Challenge: Develop agents that can pass on information about a past or distant culture without disrupting historic authenticity or player engagement. Aim: Develop proof of concepts using historical situations, face tracking, speech to text or biofeedback and game-themed situations. Opportunity: developments in biofeedback and realistic avatars, and camera tracking. Future direction: combine with psychologists and animation specialists along with linguists, historians and art historians.

1. Cultural Agents (in VES)
The Workshop on Multimodal Human-Agent Interfaces for VES
Erik Champion, Curtin University
20.11.2014, Macquarie University
(Building E6A room 357) 8:30am - 5:30pm

2. • Challenge: Develop agents that can pass on information
about a past or distant culture without disrupting historic
authenticity or player engagement.
• Aim: Develop proof of concepts using historical
situations, face tracking, speech to text or biofeedback
and game-themed situations.
• Opportunity: developments in biofeedback and realistic
avatars, and camera tracking.
• Future direction: combine with psychologists and
animation specialists along with linguists, historians and
art historians.

3. Cultural agents
• past work
• cultural agents versus social
agents
• biofeedback
• spatial projection and
immersion
• camera tracking and posture
• cultural impostors scenario

4. Past work

5. 2001-5 Shared Alterity, Avatar Changes Missed, Boring Bots

6. 2006 Source+Wild Divine, Cinematic Shaders, NPC face anim

7. 2006-13 UNITY+bio; POC: Bio-faced NPC; Stealth (thief)..

8. Shadows of the Colossus:
areas of vulnerability
http://www.leviathyn.com/opinion/2014/01/18/shadow-colossus-still-masterpiece/

9. Roger Caillois Star Wars: Jedi Academy

10. Perth Games Festival 2014: Integrate Posture+Social Proxemics

11. CULTURAL AGENT
• Recognises, adds to or transmits physically
embedded and embodied aspects of culture
• Culture is itself heritage-biased towards past and
future unlike society’s now-focus.
• Recognising culture independently of social
agents is possible but cultural agents change
cultural knowledge (as infrastructure or
institution).

12. a cultural agent should..
1. Automatically select correct cultural behaviours
given specific events or situations.
2. Recognise in/correct cultural behaviours given
specific events or situations.
3. Transmit cultural knowledge.
4. Modify or create or command artefacts that
become cultural knowledge.

13. Test: Elegy For A Dead World
http://www.dejobaan.com/elegy-educators/

14. Neuroscience
Facebook+MRI scanning+realtime Unity:
(the UCSF Neuroscape Lab, the UCSF Gazzaley lab and the UCSD Swartz
Centre for Computational Neuroscience, Glass Brain

15. PublicVR:
Virtual Theater/re District of Pompeii
• Our scholarly goals are:
• (1) Demonstrate how the connecting areas of
the theater district functioned in the larger
architectural space.
• (2) Illustrate the evolution of this popular long-uncovered
site, as a physical and cultural
artifact. We are interested in how it has
changed in the popular and scholarly
imagination over the years.
• (3) Demonstrate best practices in information
access and presentation.
• (4) Provide all software and source materials
to the public.
• (5) Provide a virtual stage for live mixed reality
theater and recreations of dramatic
performances.

16. Egyptian Oracle
• The Egyptian Oracle performance is a live
reenactment of an authentic public
ceremony from ancient Egypt’s Late
Period. We project our Virtual Egyptian
Temple on the wall at life scale extending
the physical theater into virtual space.
• The show conforms to a high level of
historical accuracy, suitable for any
museum setting.
• Members of the audience come before
the god with questions and problems to
be solved. The priest poses questions to
the god, and interprets the movements of
the boat as divine revelation, with the
force of law; the processional Oracle was
an essential feature of Egyptian public life
during this period.
http://publicvr.org/html/pro_oracle.html

18. nb CFP on serious games
• http://www.digra.org/cfp-special-issue-journal-of-entertainment-
computing-on-serious-games/
• Submissions to be considered for: Entertainment
Computing, Elsevier: Special Issue on Entertainment in
Serious Games and Entertaining Serious Purposes
(seriousexperience@gmail.com )
• 31 January 2015: Submission Deadline
31 May 2015: Acceptance / Rejection
31 August 2015: Revision Submission
-October / November 2015: Publication

19. Questions?
Erik Champion, MCCA, Curtin University erik.champion@curtin.edu.au