Collaborative plans for complex group action
Artificial Intelligence
Extending virtual humans to support team training in virtual reality
Exploring artificial intelligence in the new millennium
Too close for comfort?: adapting to the user's cultural background
Proceedings of the international workshop on Human-centered multimedia
But that was in another country: agents and intercultural empathy
Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1
Feeling and reasoning: a computational model for emotional characters
EPIA'05 Proceedings of the 12th Portuguese conference on Progress in Artificial Intelligence
One for All or One for One? The Influence of Cultural Dimensions in Virtual Agents' Behaviour
IVA '09 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
Generating culture-specific gestures for virtual agent dialogs
IVA'10 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Intelligent virtual agents
Culture-related differences in aspects of behavior for virtual characters across Germany and Japan
The 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2
Culture-related topic selection in small talk conversations across Germany and Japan
IVA'11 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Intelligent virtual agents
Creating adaptive affective autonomous NPCs
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
A new approach to social behavior simulation: the mask model
ICIDS'11 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling
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There is currently an ongoing demand for richer Intelligent Virtual Environments (IVEs) populated with social intelligent agents. As a result, many agent architectures are taking into account a plenitude of social factors to drive their agents' behaviour. However, cultural aspects have been largely neglected so far, even though they are a crucial aspect of human societies. This is largely due to the fact that culture is a very complex term that has no consensual definition among scholars. However, there are studies that point out some common and relevant components that distinguish cultures such as rituals and values. In this article, we focused on the use of rituals in synthetic characters to generate cultural specific behaviour. To this end, we defined the concept of ritual and integrated it into an existing agent architecture for synthetic characters. A ritual is seen as a symbolic social activity that is carried out in a predetermined fashion. This concept is modelled in the architecture as a special type of goal with a pre-defined plan. Using the architecture described, and in order to assess if it is possible to express different cultural behaviour in synthetic characters, we created two groups of agents that only differed in their rituals. An experiment was then conducted using these two scenarios in order to evaluate if users could identify different cultural behaviour in the two groups of characters. The results show that users do indeed identify the differences in the two cultures and most importantly that they ascribe the differences to cultural factors.