Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA)

During the summer of 2005, I worked as an animator for the ArticuLab at Northwestern University.

The project that I worked on was meant for collaborative storytelling with a virtual peer. I was responsible for animating a virtual character designed to interact with children. The character is meant to mimic the verbal and gesture actions of a real person in the act of storytelling.

As part of this work I improved the animation pipeline of the ECA by incorporating new animations into the system, reworking the connection between animation software and the code base, and helping to develop an automatic real-time lip syncing system based on pre-made viseme animations and phonemes extracted from audio files.