Designing Commercial Applications with Life-like Characters

Abstract

More and more digital content is becoming available due to a fast growing number of electronic databases, catalogue systems and systems for content management and customer relationship management. However, the increasing amount of digitally available information demands for new and innovative ways that enables users to access information in an efficient and intuitive way. Interactive and conversational animated characters provide a promising option for mediated information access in a wide field of potential application areas. This talk presents and demonstrates the CharActor^TM technology that has been developed by Charmel GmbH. CharActor^TM supports application designers who wish to deploy animated characters as a front-end to various kinds of information systems. By means of selected examples, we will discuss all aspects of application development, including marketing and service definition, character design, modeling, animation, and integration into Charamel’s real-time platform. In particular, the technology will be demonstrated and discussed by means of some selected projects.