Believable Agents: Building Interactive Personalities.

In the traditional character-based arts of film, books, animation, or theater, the audience is presented with vivid, powerful, personality-rich characters such as Rick from Casablanca or the Genie or Flying Carpet from Walt Disneys Aladdin. Unless one can afford a troop of improvisational actors and not even then for characters such as the Flying Carpet, one is only able to watch these rich characters. Believable agents allow people to not just watch, but also interact with such powerful, personality-rich characters. Believable agents are a combination of autonomous agents and believable characters from the traditional character-based arts, such as animation, film or literature. They are accurately described both as autonomous agents with the same powerful properties as characters from the arts, and as computer-based, interactive versions of personality-rich characters. Believable agents could be powerfully used for art, entertainment, as part of interactive story systems, social user interfaces, or teaching systems.