SBIR Phase I: Artificial Intelligence and Character Animation

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to create a tool, a program that would allow a user to create interactive, animated character with movements and a personality. This is Artificial Intelligence for Character Animation. Until recently, artificial intelligence has resided only in laboratories, research institutions and professional game development studios. The main innovations will be in taking a system that has resided in academia, and putting that power of creating characters into the hands of every professional software developer and artist. To develop the proposed tool research must be undertaken in the following areas: Brain Architecture - networks and nodes that determine the character's brain, Brain Functionality - relationships among networks in the character's brain, and Real-Time Authoring - interactively specifying a character's personality. The tool envisions a graphical editing environment that reads in data, allows the user to modify it, and writes it out again. It reads in the ".ing" file together with industry-standard file formats for specifying 3D models, animations, textures, sounds, etc. It allows the user to compose characters and to author their behavioral specifications through a set of Graphical User Interface (GUI) Editors. The proposed tool will allow everyone from large companies to individual people to create an interactive AI-based communication means to sell products or services. The latest trend is to not sell a product, but to sell a brand, to make the consumer create an affinity with a brand and its brand icon: e.g., the Planters' Peanut, the M&Ms, the Michelin Man. Characters connect with consumers on a visceral, emotional level. This tool will allow a professional developer or artist to create a character that represents the artist and the company associated with the artist to put that character on the Internet. As Internet users clamor for increasingly compelling content, millions of jobs have been created. This innovation creates developer jobs and allows both large companies and individuals to offer their products and services in a mass communication forum.