Social Synthetic Characters

• Main Authors: Bill Tomlinson, Bruce Blumberg, Visfiles Column
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2002
• Subjects: Arctic; Tundra
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1.7619; http://characters.media.mit.edu/Papers/VisfilesFinal.pdf

ree fully-autonomous adults. The wolves and their virtual world are rendered with a custom-written non-photorealistic "charcoal renderer" that tries to capture the feel of the arctic tundra. Over the course of each five-minute interaction, the pups grow up and, with the help of the participants, find their places in the pack. While the human participants in AlphaWolf are able to direct the actions of their virtual wolves, the wolves are not just puppets. Rather, they maintain their own personalities and social relationships, which affect the style of their behavior. While a pup's attitude toward its social partners may be inferred by the quality of its motions, we also display several wolf-shaped icons at the edge of each screen to serve as a means of visualizing that pup's relationships. Each time the pup forms a relationship with another wolf a new icon appears, showing an image of that social partner in a characteristic pose reflecting the pup's perception of the relationship betwe