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Real-time Aesthetics and Experience Lab
Lighting System (ELE)
As part of my dissertation, I have developed an automatic lighting system called ELE (Expressive Lighting Engine), which
uses expressive lighting techniques derived from the film and theatre lighting design theory to make lighting decisions in
real time to satisfy several design goals, including establishing visibility, portraying dramatic tension, and
directing viewer's attention to important artifacts while maintaining visual continuity between frames.
ELE uses non-linear optimization algorithms to place lights and adjust their angles and colors given the stage
configuration and placements of characters on the stage, the importance of each character, and the dramatic tension of the moment.
MIRAGE
I developed an interactive story called Mirage, funded by CIRA (Center for Interdisplinary Research in Arts). Mirage, based on the ancient Greek tragedy Electra, is an interactive graphical (visual and audio) experience where a participant plays the role of a character. The participant is presented with a number of choices involving relationships, justice, redemption, family ties, etc. The character of the participant is modeled in four-dimensions: violent, self-interested, coward, and reluctant hero. During interaction with Mirage, the participant will be asked to make choices that affect the character he/she projects in the narrative. This projected character will directly affect the story. I recruited and led the team of artists who developed Mirage. The team included a sketch artist, a screenwriter, two animators, four voice actors, a sound designer, a music composer, and a visual effects artist (who won an Academy Award for his animation work in Starship Troopers ).
For more information about Mirage Click here
Authoring System
To make the job of implementing Mirage easier, in addition to the lighting system (ELE), I developed an interactive narrative architecture that is composed of a number of systems, including a camera system, a characters controller system, and a director agent. The camera and characters controller systems move the characters and the camera depending on a specific script dictated by the artist. The director agent ensures right timing of behavior execution, facilitates interaction, and synchronizes behaviors among camera, lights, and character controllers.
FLAME
My master's research focused on developing believable characters. Previous research showed that simulating the emotional process is necessary for building believable characters (OZ project, see Resources' page). My research aimed to investigate the role of the learning process on believability. I designed a model called FLAME (Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotions) (El-Nasr et al. 2000, see publications' page ). Emotional states have no definite boundaries. Therefore, one possible method for representing these states is to use fuzzy linguistic variables and fuzzy sets. The model used Fuzzy Logic inference rules and OCC (Ortony's work on Emotions, see Resources' page) to derive an emotional state based on the character's goals and expectations. I used reinforcement learning, conditional learning, among other learning algorithms, to derive expectations given a situation. Emotional states were translated to behaviors based on a number of rules derived from psychology research.
In this project, we have integrated the emotional agent model simulated in PETEEI with visualization models for mapping emotions into facial expressions to create an interactive simulation of an agent (a baby agent) that produces appropriate facial expressions in a dynamic environment.
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