The Knowledge Engineering Review

Table of Contents - 2008 - Volume 23, Issue 04  

Article

Modeling emotional action for social characters

Hongwei Yanga1, Zhigeng Pana1, Mingmin Zhanga1 and Chunhua Jua2

a1 State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, PR China; e-mail: yanghongwei@cad.zju.edu.cn, zgpan@cad.zju.edu.cn, zmm@cad.zju.edu.cn

a2 Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou 310027, PR China; e-mail: juchuhua@hotmail.com

Abstract

Emotion is an important aspect of human intelligence and has been shown to play a significant role in the human decision-making process. This paper proposes a comprehensive computational model of emotions that can be incorporated into the physiological and social components of the emotions. Since interaction between characters can have a major impact on emotional dynamics, the model presents a social learning component for learning associations among characters, which in turn affects the character’s decision-making and social interactions. The model also designs a set of personality progression functions to enhance individual differences. In addition, we demonstrate this empirically through a computer simulation of a dynamic environment inhabited by a few characters to test our emotional model. The experiments show the effectiveness of our emotional model to build believable characters during interaction with the virtual environment.