Fully Embodied Conversational Avatars:Making Communicative Behaviors Autonomous

Fully Embodied Conversational Avatars:Making Communicative Behaviors
Autonomous, by J. CASSELL AND H. VILHJÁLMSSON

More recently, the creators of multi-user environments have realized that avatars need to be animated in order to bring them to life, but their approach has not taken into account the number and kind of different communicative functions of the body during an encounter. They provide menus where users can select from a set of animation sequences or switch between different emotional representations. The largest problem with this approach is that the user has to explicitly control every change in the avatar’s state. In reality however, many of the visual cues important to conversation are spontaneous and even involuntary, making it impossible for the user to explicitly select them from a menu. Furthermore, the users are often busy
producing the content of their conversation, so that simultaneous behavior control
becomes a burden" (2)