Anticipation and Believability

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss the relation between anticipation and believability. We start by introducing the concept of believability and the importance of both emotion and anticipation in the generation of believable behaviour. Then, we present some related work examplifying how emotions and anticipation have been used in the field of synthetic characters, with a particular focus on anticipation. Afterwards, we present how the relation between anticipation and emotion has been researched by the authors to create the emotivector, an anticipatory mechanism aimed at assisting the generation of autonomous believable behaviour for synthetic characters. As a fusion between the fields of affective computing and anticipatory computing, the emotivector generates affective signals from the mismatch between predicted and sensed values, and is inspired by the psychology of emotion and attention. We present two applications of the emotivector, demonstrating its adequacy: one in the realtime control of a situated, embodied agent inhabiting a virtual world, and another, in the real-time control of the affective expressions of a robotic affective chess ‘buddy’. Finally, we describe a successful integration of the low-level emotivector mechanism in a high-level cognitive agent architecture and the benefits of such integration.