Affective Interaction Paradigms for Animated Characters

 Bill Tomlinson, UC Irvine
  
  wmtuci.edu

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University April 29, 2005

This talk describes research into novel interaction paradigms that help people engage with interactive animated characters. Engaging character-based interactions can provide new platforms for education and entertainment. Several past and current projects will be shown, including Alan Alda howling at the AlphaWolf installation, and the Virtual Raft Project from the Interactivity program at CHI 05.

Bill Tomlinson is an Assistant Professor of Informatics and Drama at the University of California, Irvine, where he teaches in the ACE (Arts Computation Engineering) graduate program. He is a researcher and animator of autonomous computational characters, and a designer of interaction paradigms that enable people to engage with these characters. Previous interactive projects have been shown at SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, the Game Developers Conference, the ZKM Future Cinema exhibition and other venues, and have been reviewed by CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Sculpture Magazine, Scientific American Frontiers, the LA Times, Wired.com and the BBC. His 1996 animated film, Shaft of Light, screened at the Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by the Anti-Defamation League in its Anti-Bias/Diversity Catalog. He holds an A.B. in Biology from Harvard College, an M.F.A. in Experimental Animation from CalArts, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the MIT Media Lab.

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View this talk on line at CS547 on Stanford OnLine

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