In the not so distant past, everyday conversations were generally held between people from the same geographical region who shared a common ground in social norms and expectations. Experiencing different cultures was only possible for a very small group of people that ventured out into the unknown, often ill-prepared with knowledge about other cultures. Due to globalization, a larger group of people is able to get in touch with other cultures nowadays. Through modern communication devices such as the Internet or teleconferencing systems, communication across different cultures is possible, even without traveling. As a result, communication is much easier on the one hand, but ABSTRACT

Integrating culture into the behavioural models of virtual characters requires knowledge from very different disciplines such as cross-cultural psychology and computer science. If culture-related behavioural differences are simulated with a virtual character system, users might not necessarily understand the intent of the designer. This is, in part, due to the influence of culture on not only users, but also designers. To gain a greater understanding of the instantiation of culture in the behaviour of virtual characters, and on this potential mismatch between designer and user, we have conducted two experiments. In these experiments, we tried to simulate one dimension of culture (Masculinity vs. Femininity) in the behaviour of virtual characters. We created four scenarios in the first experiment and six in the second. In each of these scenarios, the same two characters interact with each other. The verbal and non-verbal behaviour of these characters differs depending on their cultural scripts. In two user perception studies, we investigated how these differences are judged by human participants with different cultural backgrounds. Besides expected differences between participants from Masculine and Feminine countries, we found significant differences in perception between participants from Individualistic and Collectivistic countries. We also found that the user's interpretation of the character's motivation had a significant influence on the perception of the scenarios. Based on our findings, we give recommendations for researchers that aim to design culture-specific behaviours for virtual characters.

Providing opportunities for children to engage with intercultural learning has frequently focused on exposure to the ritual, celebrations and festivals of cultures, with the view that such experiences will result in greater acceptance of cultural differences. Intercultural conflict is often avoided, bringing as it does particular pedagogical, ethical and political dilemmas of which cultures we place in conflict in the multicultural classroom. In this paper we discuss an alternative approach, providing children with an interactive learning experience with synthetic cultures and characters. The agent architecture developed to enable intelligent agents to exhibit culturally appropriate affect and behaviours is outlined. MIXER, an experiential learning application developed for 9–11 year old children on intercultural conflict is described, highlighting the learning goals and approaches. A school-based evaluation of MIXER with 144 UK children is presented. Children demonstrated high levels of comprehension, engagement and enjoyment of MIXER, with MIXER contributing to near and far transfer, supporting children’s cognitive, emotional and behavioural learning and stimulating discussion and debate about how to resolve conflict.

Culture plays a crucial role in our lives. Depending on our cultural background, we judge on and react to everything that we encounter. Subtle differences in behavior can lead to misunderstandings or even culture shock. In a similar manner, virtual characters can be declined by certain user groups when showing culturally inappropriate behavior. But how can social aspects such as culture be integrated into the behavioral models of virtual characters? Birgit Endrass addresses this question by carrying out a hybrid approach that is based on theoretical background from the social sciences as well as a multimodal corpus analysis, and exemplified the approach for the German and Japanese cultures. For this purpose, different methods from artificial intelligence and multiagent systems are applied and simulated with a virtual character system.

Providing fun, engaging child-centric approaches to interaction is challenging. The Pictorial Interaction Language was developed for children to communicate and interact with virtual characters in a serious game, MIXER. The design and development of the Pictorial Interaction Language is briefly outlined. Results highlight that children found interacting fun and were highly positive about the Pictorial Interaction Language.

interactive demo features MIXER, a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) consisting of synthetic characters representing the various actors in a scenario group difference scenario. MIXER creates virtual dramas by using interactive narrative with those characters. The goal is to enable children to identify social rule differences, by interacting with one of the characters to which they become empathic. MIXER is evaluated in the UK and Germany with children aged 9 to 11 years. The video for the demo content can be found at: http://youtu.be/jKIndn5NPaQ

Although generally not appreciated, lying constitutes a great part of human conversation. Thereby the nonverbal behavior plays a crucial role, as so-called deception cues can reveal the real intention or emotion by facial expressions or body movements. In this paper, we examine facial cues of deception and present a preliminary perception study with a humanoid robot that exhibits these cues. Initial results indicate that the shown expressions affect the observer’s impression.

In this paper, we outline the creation of an engaging and intuitive pictorial language as an interaction modality to be used by school children aged 9 to 11 years to interact with virtual characters in a cultural learning environment. Interaction takes place on a touch screen tablet computer linked to a desktop computer on which the characters are displayed. To investigate the benefit of such an interaction style, we conducted an evaluation study to compare the pictorial interaction language with a menu-driven version for the same system. Results indicate that children found the pictorial interaction language more fun and more exciting than the menus, with users expressing a desire to interact for longer using the pictorial interaction language. Thus, we think the pictorial interaction language can help support the children’s experiential learning, allowing them to concentrate on the content of the cultural learning scenario.

Through interaction with the virtual environment and virtual characters, users are able to influence the storyline of many games. The design choice for the style of interactivity can thereby have a crucial influence on the user's experience. However, only a few approaches evaluate different interaction modalities for one system to investigate the impact of design choice on the users' experience. In this paper, we present an experimental approach in which we first reflect on design alternatives concerning a specific element of interactive narratives-user-character dialog-and then investigate user responses to different design options (round-based dialog versus continuous dialog). Results of an experimental evaluation study show that users tend to prefer continuous interaction in a soap-opera-like game environment using typed text input to communicate with virtual characters that act and react using speech output, although the recognition rate of user utterances of the continuous version was slightly worse compared to the round-based version.

The design and implementation of embodied virtual agents that converse with human users and/or other agents using natural language is an important application area for Natural Language Generation (NLG). While traditional NLG systems focus on information provision (the transformation of content from a knowledge base into natural language for providing information to readers), embodied conversational agents also need to exhibit human-like qualities. These qualities range from the integration of verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviors – such as facial expressions, gestures, and speech – to the simulation of social and emotional intelligence. To be believable, embodied conversational agents should not all show the same behavior. Rather, they should be realized as individuals that portray personality and culture in a convincing manner.

This paper presents a full body interaction approach developed for Traveller, an intercultural training game for young adults based on an interactive storytelling scenario. Traveller involves virtual characters interacting with the users on a large display screen. The users interact with a Kinect, performing full body gestures and controlling a freehand swipe menu to trigger navigation and dialogue actions in the game. A first evaluation proved the recognition capabilities of our system and the comparison with a mouse interface in terms of usability and user experience showed higher positive affect with the Kinect, but a tendency for higher usability and flow with the mouse.

Cultural background can crucially influence human behavior. For virtual characters, that are supposed to imitate human behavior in a natural manner, integrating cultural background came into focus the recent years. Unlike earlier approaches, this paper presents a hybrid approach of modeling a Bayesian network that generates culture-specific behaviors for virtual characters. For the hybrid approach, the structure of the network is designed based on social science theories, while its parameters are derived from a video corpus.

In this paper, we investigate the effects of language variety in combination with bodily behaviour on the perceived personality of a virtual agent. In particular, we explore changes on the extroversion-introversion dimension of personality. An online perception study was conducted featuring a virtual character with different levels of expressive body behaviour and different synthetic voices representing German and Austrian language varieties. Clear evidence was found that synthesized language variety, and gestural expressivity influence the human perception of an agent's extroversion. Whereby Viennese and Austrian standard language are perceived as more extrovert than it is the case for the German standard.

MIXER (Moderating Interactions for Cross-Cultural Empathic Relationships), which applies a novel approach to the education of children in cultural sensitivity. MIXER incorporates intelligent affective and interactive characters, including a model of a Theory of Mind mechanism, in a simulated virtual world. We discuss the relevant pedagogical approaches, related work, the underlying mind model used for MIXER agents as well as its innovative interaction interface utilising a tablet computer and a pictorial interaction language. We then consider the evaluation of the system, whether this shows it met its pedagogical objectives, and what can be learned from our results.

This interactive demo features MIXER, a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) consisting of synthetic characters representing the various actors in a scenario group difference scenario. MIXER creates virtual dramas by using interactive narrative with those characters. The goal is to enable children to identify social rule differences, by interacting with one of the characters to which they become empathic. MIXER is evaluated in the UK and Germany with children aged 9 to 11 years. The video for the demo content can be found at: http://youtu.be/jKIndn5NPaQ