Abstract
The development of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) involves a wide range of cutting-edge technologies extending from multimodal perception to reasoning to synthesis. While each is important to a successful outcome, it is the synthesis that has the most immediate impact on the observer. The specific appearance and voice of an embodied conversational agent (ECA) can be decisive factors in meeting its social objectives. In light of this, we have developed an extensively customizable system for synthesizing a virtual talking 3D head. Rather than requiring explicit integration into a codebase, our software runs as a service that can be controlled by any external client, which substantially simplifies its deployment into new applications. We have explored the benefits of this approach across several internal research projects and student exercises as part of a university topic on ECAs.
This work was funded by the Thinking Head project, an Australian Joint ARC/NHMRC Thinking Systems Special Research Initiative.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bickmore, T., Cassell, J.: Social dialogue with embodied conversational agents. In: van Kuppevelt, J., Dybkjaer, L., Bernsen, N. (eds.) Advances in Natural, Multimodal Dialogue Systems, pp. 23–54. Kluwer Academic, New York (2005)
Blanz, V., Vetter, T.: A morphable model for the synthesis of 3d faces. In: SIGGRAPH 1999: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pp. 187–194. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York (1999)
Cassell, J.: Embodied conversational agents: representation and intelligence in user interface. AI Magazine 22(3), 67–83 (2001)
FaceGen SDK 3.6, http://www.facegen.com
Gulz, A., Haakeb, M.: Design of animated pedagogical agents a look at their look. Int. J. Human-Computer Studies 64, 322–339 (2006)
Kopp, S., Sowa, T., Wachsmuth, I.: Imitation games with an artificial agents: From mimicking to understanding shape-related iconic gestures. In: Braffort, A., Gherbi, R., Gibet, S., Richardson, J., Teil, D. (eds.) Gesture-Based Communication in Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 436–447. Springer, Berlin (2004)
Massaro, D.W.: From multisensory integration to talking heads and language learning. In: Calvert, G., Spence, C., Stein, B.E. (eds.) Advances in Natural, Multimodal Dialogue Systems, pp. 153–176. MIT Press, Cambridge (2004)
Microsoft Speech API 5.3, http://msdn.microsoft.com/speech
Milne, M., Luerssen, M., Lewis, T., Leibbrandt, R., Powers, D.: Development of a virtual agent based social tutor for children with autism spectrum disorders. In: Proc. 20th Int. Joint Conf. on Neural Networks, pp. 1555–1563. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2010)
Moreno, R., Flowerday, T.: Students’ choice of animated pedagogical agents in science learning: A test of the similarity-attraction hypothesis on gender and ethnicity. Contemporary Educational Psychology 31, 186–207 (2006)
Oh, I., Stone, M.: Understanding RUTH: Creating believable behaviors for a virtual human under uncertainty. In: Duffy, V.G. (ed.) HCII 2007 and DHM 2007. LNCS, vol. 4561, pp. 443–452. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Poggi, I., Pelachaud, C., de Rosis, F., Carofiglio, V., Carolis, B.D.: GRETA. A Believable Embodied Conversational Agent. In: Stock, O., Zancarano, M. (eds.) Multimodal Intelligent Information Presentation, vol. 27, pp. 3–25. Springer, Netherlands (2005)
Powers, D., Luerssen, M., Lewis, T., Leibbrandt, R., Milne, M., Pashalis, J., Treharne, K.: MANA for the Aging. In: Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Companionable Dialogue Systems, ACL 2010, pp. 7–12. ACL (2010)
Schroder, M., Trouvain, J.: The German text-to-speech synthesis system MARY: A tool for research, development and teaching. International Journal of Speech Technology 6(4), 365–377 (2003)
Wang, A., Emmi, M., Faloutsos, P.: Assembling an expressive facial animation system. In: Sandbox 2007: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Video Games, pp. 21–26. ACM, New York (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Luerssen, M., Lewis, T., Powers, D. (2010). Head X: Customizable Audiovisual Synthesis for a Multi-purpose Virtual Head. In: Li, J. (eds) AI 2010: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6464. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17432-2_49
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17432-2_49
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17431-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17432-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)