SmartBody: behavior realization for embodied conversational agents
By Marcus Thiébaux, Stacy C. Marsella, Andrew N. Marshall, Marcelo Kallmann. Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2008
314 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Researchers demand much from their embodied conversational agents (ECAs), requiring them to be both life-like, as well as responsive to events in an interactive setting. We find that a flexible combination of animation approaches may be needed to satisfy these needs. In this paper we present SmartBody, an open source modular framework for animating ECAs in real time, based on the notion of hierarchically connected animation controllers. Controllers in SmartBody can employ arbitrary animation algorithms such as keyframe interpolation, motion capture or procedural animation. Controllers can also schedule or combine other controllers. We discuss our architecture in detail, including how we incorporate traditional approaches, and develop the notion of a controller as a reactive module within a generic framework, for realizing modular animation control. To illustrate the versatility of the architecture, we also discuss a range of applications that have used SmartBody successfully.
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ba67705aa5d45ea3cff74104d0cb9082dd7add7
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
- Louis-philippe Morency
- Andrew Owens
- Percy Liang
- Jitendra Malik
- Jianfeng Gao
- Shiry Ginosar
- Amir Bar
- Kristen Grauman
Citations in the corpus
- Learning Individual Styles of Conversational Gesture (2019, background): “Visualizing predicted gestures One of the most common ways of visualizing gestures is to use them to animate a 3D avatar [40, 27, 19].”
- Conversational Agents and Natural Language Interaction: Techniques and Effective Practices (2011, background): “, 2008), recognize nonverbal cues (Morency & de Kok, 2008), analyze social and emotional factors (Gratch & Marsella, 2004) and synthesize human conversation and nonverbal expressions which are synchronized together to produce realistic actions, facial expressions, lip syncing and gaze (Thiebaux et a”
- SimSensei kiosk: a virtual human interviewer for healthcare decision support (2014, methodology): “To animate Ellie, we use the SmartBody character animation [35].”