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The NECA Project (Net Environment for Embodied Emotional Conversational Agents) was a research project that focused on multimodal communication with animated agents in a
virtual world A virtual world (also called a virtual space) is a computer-simulated environment which may be populated by many users who can create a personal avatar, and simultaneously and independently explore the virtual world, participate in its activities ...
. NECA was funded by the
European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...
from 1998–2002 and the research results were published up to 2005.Brigitte Krenn, et al. ''Lifelike Agents for the Internet'' in "Agent culture: human-agent interaction in a multicultural world" edited by Sabine Payr, Robert Trappl 2004 pages 197-228NECA Project description
/ref>Brigitte Krenn and Barbara Neumayr ''Incorporating animated conversation into a web-based Community Building Tool'' in "Intelligent virtual agents: 4th International Workshop, IVA 2003", edited by Thomas Rist pages 18-22 The project focused on communication between animated agents in a
virtual world A virtual world (also called a virtual space) is a computer-simulated environment which may be populated by many users who can create a personal avatar, and simultaneously and independently explore the virtual world, participate in its activities ...
, using characters that exhibit realistic personality traits and natural looking behavior that reflects the emotional features of conversations. The project goal was to combine different research efforts such as situation-based
natural language In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...
and speech generation, representation of non-verbal expression, and the modeling of
emotion Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. ...
s and
personality Personality is the characteristic sets of behaviors, cognitions, and emotional patterns that are formed from biological and environmental factors, and which change over time. While there is no generally agreed-upon definition of personality, mos ...
.Patrick Gebhard, et al. ''Coloring Multi-character Conversations through the Expression of Emotions'' in "Affective dialogue systems" edited by Elisabeth André 2004 ISBN pages 125-139


Goals and milestones

The underlying research direction of the NECA Project was the development of a computing platform in which animated characters within a virtual world could be capable of realistic behavior. For character interactions to look natural, various factors such the proxemics of the distance between their bodies as they interact, to the kinesics of
body language Body language is a type of communication in which physical behaviors, as opposed to words, are used to express or convey information. Such behavior includes facial expressions, body posture, gestures, eye movement, touch and the use of space. Th ...
at the individual level, and the level of eye contact between individuals, as well as the
paralinguistics Paralanguage, also known as vocalics, is a component of meta-communication that may modify meaning, give nuanced meaning, or convey emotion, by using techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. It is sometimes defined as relatin ...
of tone and intonation of sentences had to be considered. Based on that the research there were three main goals for NECA. The first goal was the general development of a platform that allowed the simulation and interaction of conversational characters. The second goal was the design of a multi-user web-application called the ''Socialite'', that allowed social "face to face" emotion-based interactions between animated agents on the internet. The Socialite user could select a set of
avatars Avatar (, ; ), is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means "descent". It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, goddess or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearance ...
to interact with and after learning about the user's personal preferences, the avatars helped the user navigate a virtual world and get in touch with other agents and users. The third component was ''eShowRoom'' as an
e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...
platform demonstration that allowed for the display of products in the commercial domain. In the eShowRoom application, two or three virtual agents could be seen discussing various features of a product among themselves in a natural setting.


Examples of NECA research

One of NECA's designs was the
Rich Representation Language The Rich Representation Language, often abbreviated as RRL, is a computer animation language specifically designed to facilitate the interaction of two or more animated characters.Intelligent virtual agents: 6th international working conference'' by ...
, specifically designed to facilitate the interaction of two or more animated agents. RRL influenced the design of other languages such as the ''Player Markup Language'' which extended parts of the design of RRL. The design of RRL aimed to automatically generate much of the facial animation as well as the skeletal animation based on the content of the conversations. Due to the interdependence of nonverbal communication components such as facial features on the spoken words, no animation is possible in the language without considering the context of the scene in which the animation takes place - e.g. anger versus joy.''Interactive storytelling'': First Joint International Conference, edited by Ulrike Spierling, Nicolas Szilas 2008 page 93


See also

* Facial Action Coding System *
Humanoid animation Humanoid Animation (HAnim) is an approved ISO and IEC standard for humanoid modeling and animation. HAnim defines a specification for defining interchangeable human figures so that those characters can be used across a variety of 3D games and simul ...
* International Computer Science Institute * Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2) * Virtual human


Sources

{{Reflist


External links


European NECA website


Computer animation Virtual reality