Current Developments - Talos Authoring tool

Talos: A Virtual Human Authoring tool

Talos is an authoring environment designed to enable content developers to create Virtual Human systems for the domain of mobile guidance. Although the system has been designed with the paper guide book creators in mind, it can also be used in other application domains as well.The final design of Talos is very complex and includes several different modules. I think that it will take a programming team of 5 people 1 year of intense work to complete.

Talos come as an idea when I realised that there are virtually no tools in the market that would enable me to rapidly create the prototypes I needed for my research work. From the final design of Talos, I was only able to implement some of its ideas, those that needed to implement my final prototype systems.

1 ) A script parser to automatically create Haptek scripts. A screen-shot of the parser is show below:

The tool is described in more detail in the topic "Current Developments - Haptek characters". The script parser of the full Talos environment follows a similar approach, but in a fully automated and real-time fashion. Talos will accept pure text as input, and generate full character performances as an output. Of course the problem is this approach, is how to make the character pointing correctly to objects in its background. This requires the character to have knowledge of its environment. My design in this area is incomplete. A possible solution, would be to divide the background of the character into segments and associate each segment with a keyword. I need to do more research on this area.
2) A simple UI (User Interface tool) that enabled me to create without too much effort, the AIML KBs needed for my final prototype systems. In more detail the UI includes:
a) An AIML\XML KB creator.
b) An AIML creator for existing question-sets (e.g., questions that you may already have in XML format)
c) A translator for both AIML/XML KBs
d) A scene character modifier where you can modify various scene and character settings (e.g., probs, backgrounds, etc)
e) A GPS integration module, where you can assign Long and Lat coordinates to various scripts and tests them in real-time
f) A speech recognition module where you can load a grammar and test it
g) A Cyc-creator module. This module was supposed to automate the creation of CYC queries suitable for insertion into AIML scripts. However, the API of ResearchCyc is extremely tough to crack (perhaps because it is pure Java) and I ended up with just a simulation.
From the above I only used "a","b",and "c" in the creation of my final prototypes. The rest of the features were not of any value to the actual development, but they lead to several improvement in the final Talos design. The UI tool is available for free. If you want to experiment with Virtual Humans, AIML and XML KB's, making location-sensitive scripts for your characters that's the best way to start.

A screenshot of the UI tool