The Effect of Affect: Modeling the Impact of Emotional State on the Behavior of Interactive Virtual Humans

: A person s behavior provides significant information about their emotional state, attitudes, and attention. Our goal is to create virtual humans that convey such information to people while interacting with them in virtual worlds. The virtual humans must respond dynamically to the events surrounding them, which are fundamentally influenced by users actions, while providing an illusion of human-like behavior. A user must be able to interpret the dynamic cognitive and emotional state of the virtual humans using the same nonverbal cues that people use to understand one another. Towards these goals, we are integrating and extending components from three prior systems: a virtual human architecture with a range of cognitive and motor capabilities, a model of emotional appraisal, and a model of the impact of emotional state on physical behavior. We describe the key research issues, our approach, and an initial implementation in an Army peacekeeping scenario.