Agents and Avatars 2

Ruth Aylett

Overview
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Crowds
Speech and Expressive behaviour
Embodied conversational characters

Creating autonomy
Scripting
Architectures

Crowds and flocking

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Interactions among
members of a group
Local neighborhood

Reynolds Boids
Originally birds or
fish
Complex behaviour
determined by
simple rules

Separation: Boid
Avoidance

Alignment

Cohesion

Motor Control
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Steering Force
Integrate to determine acceleration
Thrust determines speed
Lateral Steering Force determines direction

Boid Object Representation

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Point Mass Vehicle

Mass
Position
Velocity
Orientation
Constrained to align with velocity

Force and Speed Limits

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(No moment of inertia)

Same maths as point objects

acceleration = steering_force / mass
Given f = ma

velocity = velocity + acceleration

Over a unit time period
Generically v = v x at

position = position + velocity

Over a unit time period
Generically s = s + vt

Seeking and Fleeing

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Aim towards target

Desired_velocity = Kp (position target)
Steering = desired_velocity velocity

Seeking and
Fleeing Applet
(Reynolds)

Pursuing and Avoiding

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Target is another moving object

Predict target s future position
Scale prediction time, T, based on distance to object, Dc

T=Dc

Pursuing and
avoiding applet
(Reynolds)

More Behaviors
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Evasion

Arrival

Like flee, but predict pursuer s movement

Like seek, but stop at target
Applet (Reynolds)

Obstacle Avoidance
Repulsive force
Aim to boundary
Adjust velocity to be perpendicular to surface normal

Do People Flock?
Social psychologist s
report that people
tend to travel as
singles or in groups
of size 2 to 5.

Controlling Steering Behavior for Small Groups of

Pedestrians in Virtual Urban Environments
Terry Hostetler, Phd dissertation, 2002

Characteristics of Small Groups

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Proximity
Coupled Behavior
Common Purpose
Relationship Between
Members

Moving Formations
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Pairs: Side by side

Triples:
Triangular shape

Stationary Formations

Moving pair approaches

stationary triple

Stationary quintuple
formed

Locomotion Model for Walking

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Two Parameters - because in 2D

Acceleration
Increase/reduce walking speed
Combination of step length and step rate

Turn
Adjust orientation
Heading direction for forward walking

Avoiding an Obstacle -Trajectory

walkway axis

walkway axis
ped 1

ped 2

Small look-ahead distance

ped 1

ped 2

Large look-ahead distance

Interaction Between Pairs -- 1

Interaction Between Pairs -- 2

Interaction Between Pairs -- 3

Adding goals
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People are usually going somewhere

Easy case: same goal
Walking to a sports stadium
Political demonstrations

Harder case: multiple goals

Campus traffic
Most public spaces: streets, shops, stations

Talking Heads
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Human faces
Thus high expectations:
Blinking, random head movement
Facial muscles
Lip sync

Rarely intelligent
Entirely scripted in most cases
No integration of speech production with
intelligent architecture and NL generation

Moving the face - 1

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Simple approach
Define overlay frames with different facial
expressions
For example, six mouth shapes

Use signal from TTS engine to pick a

mouth shape
This works OK with cartoon-like characters

Moving the face - 2

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Visemes
Mouth and lip position
for each phoneme
Correspond to a
submesh in the
geometry

Using visemes
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Find viseme for each phoneme

Synchronise graphical change with sound

Catalan weather forecaster

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Complete talking character

Weather forecasts have predictable content
Still have to match content and behaviour
<demo via browser: sam_mosca_ok.wmv>

Autonomy
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An independent sense-reflect-act cycle: implies

An agent-based action-selection mechanism
Self-animation in real-time: cannot be pre-rendered
Local sensing
Virtual robotics

Not a natural graphics view

Global manipulation of polygons
Hierarchical scene-graph

Scripting
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Typical of NPCs in computer games

What representational content is
needed?
Can just invoke named animations
What parameters?
Depends on animation approach

Scripting with Finite State Automata

Tennis
game
FSM
sequence"

Limitations of scripting
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Becomes predictable
Either independent of local sensing
Or single FSM transition stimulus

Limited ability to use internal state

Interaction memory
Affective state

Lacks sequencing flexibility

Sequence is hardwired

Low-level architecture

Functional Architecture

for a fish

High-level architecture

VE or visualisation?
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Embed all behaviour into scenegraph?

Advantage: efficiency
Disadvantage: tied to scenegraph software

Or visualise simulated world?

Loosely coupled: how to link?
Message-passing between world simulation
and scenegraph

Using game engines

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Offer some support for NPCs

More facilities than a scenegraph
Attaching animations to graphical bodies
Imports from popular 3D packages like Character
Studio

Disadvantages
Proprietary; oriented to scripting
Hard (in some cases impossible) to implement sensing
Fixed paths quite often

Often focused on shooting