Related Sites

The Virtual Theater Project here at Stanford. Our research has been focused on building the minds of intelligent, interactive characters.

Extempo Systems is Barbara's company, which that designs and builds synthetic actors for incorporation into interactive products for entertainment, education, and business.

The Oz Project at Carnegie-Mellon University headed by Joseph Bates. The Oz Project is engaged in building technology and art to create high-quality interactive drama. Among other things, they are interested in believable agents and computer-generated narrative.

The Software Agent Group at MIT under Pattie Maes. This group is more generally interested in designing agents that can learn, collaborate, and plan. Several of their projects have involved believable, interactive agents.

The Media Research Laboratory at NYU. This lab, directed by Ken Perlin, created the animation system used in our master/servant scenarios. They are also interested in immersive environments and behavioral scripting for animated agents.

The Cognition and Affect Project at the University of Birmingham. Aaron Sloman, Glyn Humphreys and his students are working on intelligent, human-like agents that have motivations and goals.

The Synthetic Characters research project under the direction of Bruce Blumberg at MIT. His group aims to create intelligent, interactive characters for storytelling, games, and Web-based worlds.

Justine Cassell's Gesture and Narrative Language Group, also at the MIT Media Lab. They work on characters, avatars and toys with "psychosocial competencies."

Clark Elliott's Affective Reasoning Project. The goal of this project is to build systems that can reason about and model human emotions and which are embedded in multimedia agents.

The IntelliMedia Project at North Carolina State University, under the direction of James Lester and Patrick FitzGerald. This project is interested in creating intelligent, lifelike 3D graphical characters to enhance educational software systems.

Microsoft's Microsoft Agent Web site. This is an easily-programmable animated character with hooks for speech recognition and synthesis. It has no brains per se, but it's a handy package for those of us who have poor graphics skills.