Animist Interface: Mapping Character Animation to Computational State
Richard Lachman IJCAI Workshop on Animated Interface Agents. Nagoya, Japan.
August 1997.

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Abstract:
This paper describes a series of experiments mapping the state of a computer system to emotional behaviour in an animated character. Rather than focussing on intelligence in the interface agent, the projects seek ways to use the agent as an avatar for the computer. Facts, recommendations and statistics about the host-system affect behaviour through the subtle cues of gaze-direction, body language, and effects on the environment around the character. The domains of email-filtering, web-browsing and system-performance are the subjects of current explorations, using modified Unix web- and email-servers and a Windows NT client.

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