Integrating Models of Personality and Emotions into Lifelike Characters

A growing number of research projects in academia and industry have recently started to develop lifelike agents as a new metaphor for highly personalised human-machine communication. A strong argument in favour of using such characters in the interface is the fact that they make human-computer interaction more enjoyable and allow for communication styles common in human-human dialogue. In this paper we discuss three ongoing projects that use personality and emotions to address different aspects of the affective agent-user interface: (a) Puppet uses affect to teach children how the different emotional states can change or modify a character's behaviour, and how physical and verbal actions in social interactions can induce emotions in others; (b) the Inhabited Market Place uses affect to tailor the roles of actors in a virtual market place; and (c) Presence uses affect to enhance the believability of a virtual character, and produce a more natural conversational manner.