Building Reactive and Emotionally Responsive Virtual Children for Edutainment and Interactive Art

This paper presents the design, architecture and implementation of an interactive virtual child animated in real-time using low-cost and portable computers. The system was created for edutainment, i.e., using entertainment and multi-modal interactivity to help learning in a virtual reality environment. We advance the state-of-the-art by using a novel model for emotional modulation implemented in the form of closed-loop dialogues. Using the above techniques we demonstrate the capabilities of our solution by means of real-world examples of four separate applications fields, namely rehabilitation, education, interactive art and mobile telephony in popular culture