The Artificial Emotion Engine(TM), Driving Emotional Behavior

Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment

Volume

Papers from the 2000 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

The Artificial Emotion Engine is designed to generate a variety of rich emotional behaviors for autonomous, believable, interactive characters. These behaviors are in the form of facial and body gestures, motivational actions and emotional internal states. It will help developers populate simulations with emotional characters while freeing them of the need for an in depth knowledge of neurophysiological systems. Technologies, like the Artificial Emotion Engine, are needed to help fuel the growth of the interactive entertainment industry from a niche medium to the mass-market medium it is becoming. Mass-market products will require the use of social interaction and engaging emotional characters to facilitate the creation of some of their most powerful experiences. Many of the technologies currently employed to produce character behavior, finite state machines (FSM’s), scripted conditional logic etc are being stretched beyond their limits. Robotic, onedimensional characters with limited sets of behaviors populate many interactive experiences, this problem needs to be addressed. In this paper we present an overview of the engine and a review of the neurophysiological model employed by the engine.