R.A.S.C.A.L.L.I.
About Rascalli
Rascalli is a research project initiated by the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) in Vienna and funded by the European Union. Led by OFAI, a consortium of international partners works on the development of Responsive Artificial Situated Cognitive Agents Living and Learning on the Internet (R.A.S.C.A.L.L.I.).
Radon Labs and the Nebula Client
Radon Labs' contribution to Rascalli consists of the so-called "Nebula Client" (NC), a stand-alone Windows application which serves two purposes:
- Provide an interface to the actual user with the help of a 3D animated character who offers a much more "human" interface
- the NC serves as an interface to the various components of Rascalli: the Platform, developed by OFAI and the MaryServer by DFKI for speech synthesis
Usage
The NC features a scene rendered in 3D real-time which shows the Agent – or Rascallo, a male or female Agent – sitting in a chair. The user can input questions and comments as text. These are then sent to the OFAI Platform. This request is processed and a file in Behaviour Markup Language (BML) is sent back to the Client with instructions which animations to play in which order, e.g. point gestures or a gaze. This takes care of the animation of the Agent. Another request is sent to the MaryServer which answers with a Wave file consisting of synthesized speech and timing information telling the Client how long to play Wave.
The Agent’s answer consists of text output accompanied by speech and animation to give the user a lively impression as if he is engaged in a conversation. The Agent may either give an answer which contains the information the user requested or refer to a weblink (URL) which contains further information. This could be any source on the WWW to contain such information like Wikipedia, IMDB or NNDB. By clicking on the link the user is taken to the respective website.
Two buttons in the user interface allow the user to give the Agent positive or negative feedback to praise and reprimand him respectively. This is used to train the Agent and make him remember which of his answers were helpful to the user. A profile of the Agent is stored on the OFAI platform server so the Agents information is stored after the user logs out.
The use of Nebula
Rascalli benefited Radon Labs' game development as it provided some valuable testing grounds for the use of the Nebula Engine. Some of the use cases were:
- Use of a complex facial rig
- Simultaneous blending of multiple animation clips
- Use of lip animation synchronous to speech output