I helped build systems that simulate human conversational behavior with Prof. Justine Cassell's Gesture and Narrative Language group at the MIT Media Lab.

Amongst many other jobs, I designed and animated the characters for GNL, working within a very challenging home-grown OpenGL animation framework.		  

GNL 2001, on vacation with a few of our agents.



BEAT is our virtual actor system. Give the system any grammatical text and it will be able to break it down, understand it, and then output timings for an animation that mimics our own innate non-verbal behaviors.

Meet Laura, a Flash deployment of BEAT.
To see her in action, download her movie.

Laura's second job is as a virtual fitness instructor. Prof. Timothy Bickmore used her to evaluate computer agents in behavior-change-inducing roles.

  

Laura
WATCH MY MOVIE
4MB



Powered by BEAT, Prof. Hannes Vilhjálmsson's avatars autonomously use eye gaze and body posture to help facilitate turn-taking between conversational partners in an online world.

For this project named SPARK, I built an online world in which the avatars could talk about a map of their surrounding area. There was a heavy emphasis on low-polygon counts for the map and surrounding tower.

  

SPARK


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