Building embodied agents that experience and express emotions

In this paper we presented Obie, an embodied agent that experiences and expresses emotions. Obie has an adaptive, quantitative and domain-independent emotion component which appraises events to trigger emotions. Obie’s emotions are expressed via his utterances or his facial expressions. The expression via utterances is done by a simple mapping from emotions to text fragments. The mapping from emotions to facial expressions is done by a fuzzy rule-based system. Obie’s utterances and facial expressions are presented in his 3D talking head. In the research described in this paper, Obie was implemented as a football supporter agent. We show how Obie experiences different emotions during a football match. We also indicate how Obie with different personalities experiences emotions differently.