The windows-based desktop metaphor ... Text and graphical user interfaces ... Multimedia displays of moving images and audio ... These three concepts constitute the majority of methods we use to communicate, to educate, to entertain with our computers and the Internet.
          And yet in our daily lives we communicate and engage in a totally different way. We talk with our friends and relatives -- we watch their facial expressions, read into their pauses, vocal inflections and hand gestures. This is the language, the syntax, that we are all truly experts in: communicating and engaging interactively with people -- with characters that emotionally engage and entertain us through films, plays and cartoons; characters that inform and try to influence us, such as teachers, sales people and business colleagues; characters that have personality and spirit.
          There is a real schism between the metaphors and interfaces we use with our interactive systems and those we use in our ubiquitous life.
          The high end computer animation industry now has the knowledge and techniques to create computer animated characters that can engage an audience. Some of this knowledge and experience has been successfully transferred over to Internet-based characters. But with few exceptions, character animation is still mimetic to the linear style associated with film.
          We are now at a seminal point in time, where it is becoming possible to combine the emotive and communicative qualities of characters with the interactive, programmatic and alternative narrative technologies of the Internet. Characters we can talk/listen to with speech recognition/synthesis; characters who exhibit the illusion of life and cognition via artificial life/intelligence algorithms, information retrieval capabilities and behavioral models. These technologies can be combined with emerging communication and narrative metaphors such as multi-user worlds, and interactive or participatory performances.
          I will discuss the implications of these issues, as well as give a presentation of projects that I have developed for both web-based hosts and multi-user avatar communities.