“Underwater Love” Building Tristão and Isolda’s Personalities

Abstract

Believability is one of the key concerns when developing synthetic characters in intelligent virtual environments. To achieve believability, the virtual characters must behave consistently with their assumed or perceived personality.

This paper describes a model for the construction of believable emotional characters with synthetic personae in intelligent virtual environments. The model assumes that personality and emotions are essentially the same mechanism and allows the definition of the characters personality by a set of emotional reactions. The system designer defines a set of concepts, which structure is inspired by Ortony, Clore and Collins’s theory of emotions, that will then automatically integrated in the IVE character cycle, inspired by Fridja’s theory of emotions. Then, the system designer implements the final IVE specific characteristics around those concepts. The methodology was applied to a real time IVE, S3A, developed in the context of the last world exposition of the century, EXPO’98, which featured two pathematic dolphins, Tristão and Isolda, who lived in the synthetic estuary of the river Sado during the four months of the EXPO’98, and were displayed to more than one million visitors.

The project showed that the followed approach is a viable solution for the creation of the synthetic personae of believable emotional agents in intelligent virtual environments.