Project Number
- 203
Title
- Toco the Toucan: A Synthetic Character Guided by Perception, Emotion, and Story
Description
- Interactive, story-influenced synthetic life form with autonomous emotional states.
Contact
- Deb Roy
Affiliation
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Address
- MIT Media Laboratory
- Perceptual Computing Section
- 20 Ames Street, Room E15-388
- Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
- Perceptual Computing Section
- dkroy@media.mit.edu
WWW
Year
- 1997
Reference
- SIGGRAPH 97 Visual Proceedings
Project Details
- Toco the Toucan is a synthetic creature that participants can interact with immediately through speech and gesture. A constrained, but not entirely predetermined, story ensures that the highly interactive experience includes some structure and an overall plot.
- An underlying emotion model drives Toco's facial expressions, sounds, and body motions. Changes in the creature's emotional state are determined by four factors:
- - Speech and other sounds produced by participant.
- - Hand and body motions of participant.
- - Constraints from underlying story-based interaction.
- - Innate tendencies toward certain emotional states (personality)
- This exhibit demonstrates the integration of several key technologies including behavior-based animation, interactive storytelling, robust computer audition and vision, and affective computing.
Sight
- graphics workstation, gesture sensor
Sound
- amplified sound
Touch
Smell
Taste
Other
Emergence
- 1 - Innovation, Custom, Research
Intent
- 1 - Technology (innovation, machine)
Primary
- 106 - autonomous character, synthetic life
Secondary
- 206 - avatar / agent
Remarks
- Implementation details undocumented.
Last updated: 5 Jul 2002
Sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH, Copyright © 2002 Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM)
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