For the first time, a comprehensive collection of the latest developments in scripting and representation languages for life-like characters. The text introduces toolkits for authoring animated characters which further supports the practicality and ease of use of this new interface technology. As life-like characters is a vibrant research area, various applications have been designed and implemented. The text covers the most successful and promising applications, ranging from product presentation and student training to knowledge integration and interactive gaming. It also discusses the key challenges in the area and provides design guidelines for employing life-like characters.

Life-like characters is one of the most exciting technologies for human-computer interface applications today. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presenters, synthetic actors and sales personas, teammates and tutors. A common characteristic underlying their life-likeness or believability as virtual conversational partners is computational models that provide them with affective functions such as synthetic emotions and personalities and implement human interactive behavior. The wide dissemination of life-like characters in multimedia systems, however, will greatly depend on the availability of control languages and tools that facilitate scripting of intelligent conversational behaviour. This book presents the first comprehensive collection of the latest developments in scripting and representation languages for life-like characters, rounded off with an in-depth comparison and synopsis of the major approaches. Introducing toolkits for authoring animated characters further supports the ease of use of this new interface technology.

Life-like characters being a vibrant research area, various applications have been designed and implemented. This book offers coverage of the most successful and promising applications, ranging from product presentation and student training to knowledge integration and interactive gaming. It also discusses the key challenges in the area and provides design guidelines for employing life-like characters.

Welcome to the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, which was held on September 1-3, 2008 in Tokyo, Japan. - telligent virtual agents (IVAs) are autonomous, graphically embodied agents in a virtual environment that are able to interact intelligently with human users, otherIVAs, andtheirenvironment. TheIVAconferenceseriesisthemajorannual meeting of the intelligent virtual agents community, attracting interdisciplinary minded researchers and practitioners from embodied cognitive modeling, art- cial intelligence, computer graphics, animation, virtual worlds, games, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction. The origin of the IVA conferences dates from a successful workshop on - telligent Virtual Environments held in Brighton, UK, at the 13th European Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (ECAI 2008). This workshop was followed by a second one held in Salford in Manchester, UK in 1999. Subsequent events took place in Madrid, Spain in 2001, Irsee, Germany 2003 and Kos, Greece in 2005. Starting in 2006, IVA moved from being a biennial to an annual event and became a full-?edged international conference, held in Marina del Rey, Calif- nia, USA in 2006, and Paris, France in 2007. From 2005, IVA also hosted the Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents (GALA), an annual festival to showcase the latest animated lifelike agents created by university students and academic or industrial research groups. IVA 2008wasthe ?rsttime thatIVA wasorganizedinAsia andwearehappy to report that a large number of papers were submitted. IVA 2008 received 99 submissions from Europe, the Americas, and Asia