Simulating empathy for the virtual human Max

Abstract

Abstract. Addressing user’s emotions in human-computer interaction significantly enhances the believability and lifelikeness of virtual humans. Emotion recognition and interpretation is realized in our approach by integrating empathy as a designated process within the agent’s cognitive architecture. In this paper we describe this empathy process which comprises of two interconnected components: a belief-desire-intention (BDI) based cognitive component and an affective component based on the emotion simulation system of the virtual human Max. The application and a preliminary evaluation of this empathy system are reported on in the context of a 3D competitive card game scenario. 1 Introduction and Related Work Empathy plays a prominent role in human-human interaction because it represents a motivational basis of prosocial behaviour and contributes to moral acts like helping, caring and justice [7]. Brave et al. [5] accentuate that empathy is a fundamental and powerful means