This special issue describes a number of applications that utilize lifelike characters that
teach indirectly, by playing some role in a social interaction with a user. The design of such …

Life-like characters is one of the most exciting technologies for human-computer interface
applications today. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presenters, synthetic actors …

A growing number of research projects in academia and industry have recently started to
develop lifelike agents as a new metaphor for highly personalised human-machine …

Life-like characters are one of the most exciting technologies for humancomputer interface
applications. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presenters, synthetic actors and …

In recent years, there has been a surge in research of embodied conversational characters.
Across applications these characters vary widely. They differ in both appearance and ability …

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 …

Adaptation capability and a transparent motivation system greatly aid real time interactions
between humans and synthetic characters. These components enhance the life-like …

During the workshop on Emotions in Humans and Artifacts, participants presented research
addressing such questions as How do emotions work in the human mind? What are …

Emotions play a critical role in creating engaging and believable characters to populate
virtual worlds. Our goal is to create general computational models to support characters that …

It is now easy to nd examples of interactive software agents and animated creatures that
have the ability to express emotion; this paper describes research for giving them the ability …