Virtual Story Telling: A methodology for developing believable communication skills in virtual actors

Abstract. Until recently virtual applications rarely incorporated any deep social, cultural or emotional capabilities exhibited in normal human interaction. In this paper, we present a methodology to develop virtual actors with believable communications skills who may provide a sufficient feeling of immersion to reproduce an efficient simulation of human activities. We focus on the relationship between gestures and verbal activities during communicative acts. We will show that an approach based on video analysis is valuable for the design of a system allowing realistic interactions between the avatars and/or the avatars and the environment. Although the analysis is still in progress, we present some preliminary results from our experiments. 1