Etiquette for Avatars: Force Multipliers for Urban Operations, April 2005

This program built our method of determining believable etiquette behavior into a computerized characters complete with a modular library of culture-specific etiquette behavior.

DARPA (Dr. Ralph Chatham 703-696-7501) under BAA 04-031 “Force Multipliers for Urban Operations” (Contract # NBCH050057) funded additional work in April of 2005. This program built our method of determining believable etiquette behavior into a computerized characters complete with a modular library of culture-specific etiquette behavior. The result was computer-based characters that exhibited etiquette behaviors and sensitivities appropriate to different cultures by simply plugging in different “culture modules”—knowledge bases of culture-specific ways to identify face threat attributes and redress them with etiquette behaviors. This program successfully demonstrated SIFT’s etiquette algorithm could control both the perceptions and the actions of game-based characters in USC’s Tactical Language Training System. A character could both determine the degree of etiquette or politeness directed at it by a human player, and to generate responses with the appropriate level of politeness. SIFT’s algorithm achieved scalability that far exceeds that of traditional scripting approaches to developing game character behaviors.

PI: Dr. Christopher Miller