Feb 2018 v01 online
((Incomplete formatting))
((Incomplete formatting))
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
the form of<br />
. A video capture is<br />
taken of a real person speaking, and combined<br />
with an algorithm that can understand what is<br />
said when a player speaks to them. It can process<br />
this information and respond with an appropriate<br />
pre-recorded answer. While this might sound<br />
rudimentary, it’s a lot more intelligent than it<br />
might seem. Programmers have advanced enough<br />
to display responses to not only direct sentences<br />
spoken, but variations of them as well; these<br />
characters in front of you are realistic (without<br />
being creepy), responsive, and seemly intelligent.<br />
The company who created this used it as an<br />
interactive collection of biographies from the<br />
USC Shoah Foundations that enables people to<br />
have conversations with Holocaust survivors. In<br />
terms of technology, my prediction is that this is<br />
where the future of realistic NPC conversations<br />
will begin. The ‘need’ will arise for more<br />
convincing human interaction when we start<br />
hearing more and more success stories of<br />
previsualization, education, empathy building<br />
and evidence building from imitating real life<br />
with humans – just as we have with environments.<br />
In terms of intelligent NPC within the medium<br />
of game development, we can find many examples<br />
in role playing games (RPG). Bioware, one of the<br />
most prominent RPG developers, create games<br />
that have multi-choice conversations which allow<br />
you to choose from a list of responses when you<br />
interact with an NPC – what the player selects<br />
impacts the NPC’s response. While it holds a few<br />
similarities with real conversation, it usually<br />
comes across comparatively smothering and<br />
limited. VR has similar mechanics in some of<br />
their applications, and their biggest downfall is<br />
having to animate a realistic interaction for every<br />
frame, every response, that could possibly be<br />
required. Many argue that this was the reason that<br />
the newest addition from the Bioware studio,<br />
Mass Effect Andromeda, publicly failed – being<br />
unable to realistically present convincing human<br />
expression, conversation and interaction<br />
comparable with the scale of realism in the rest of<br />
the game.
Change language