Reference: Rousseau, D. & Hayes-Roth, B. Personality in Synthetic Actors. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, December, 1996.
Abstract: Personality is a set of psychological traits which influence an individual's behavior and give him or her a certain style. Combining visions from work in psychology, artificial intelligence and theater, we are studying the use of personality by intelligent, automated actors able to improvise their behavior in order to portray characters, and to interact with users in a multimedia environment. We show how psychological personality traits can be exploited to produce a performance that is theatrically interesting and believable without being completely predictable. We describe the model of a synthetic actor that takes into account those concepts to choose its behavior in a given context. In order to test our approach, we observe the performance of autonomous actors portraying waiters with different personalities in interaction with user-driven customers in an application called the Cybercafe. A personality-sensitive text animator is used to display the description of the actios performed by the actors.
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