Daniel Keller

3/24/03

ACS 279

Final Project Paragraph

Proposition: To Build a “Character”

Using Microsoft Agent Technology

For my ACS 279 final programming project, I would like to build what is known as a “character” using Microsoft Agent Technology, and then have the character interact with the class during an in-class demonstration. Microsoft Agent characters are an animated “cartoon” character that provides interactive and friendly technical support for user applications. The Microsoft Agent engine provides a lot of capabilities to make your character seem lifelike, realistic, and friendly, including: a large standard animation set, the ability to use conditional branching with its animations, the ability to interpret text input, the ability to use speech recognition for input, the ability to speak through text-to-speech engines, and the ability to interact with other Agent characters.

The Agent character I plan to develop will be a female arctic blue fox named “Foxee.” She will be a very friendly character with a passive-type personality and will have several real fox sounds to go along with her animations. She may also use a text-to-speech engine to communicate. The project will require an enormous amount of work to develop both the front-end and the back-end of my Foxee character. For the front-end, Foxee will require hand drawn animation, a complex and tedious process I have been slowly teaching myself over the course of the semester. Hand drawn animation requires 12 drawings for every second of action, and is done with special pencils on 20lb. 12-field animation paper. The animation paper has a series of round and rectangular registration holes known as the “ACME” system, which keeps all of the animation paper held in the same place. Every second or so of footage must go through a rough animation test known as a “pencil test” to show that all of the animation is flowing smoothly. After the animation is complete and cleaned up, each frame of the animation will have to be individually painted on the computer to give the character its appropriate colors. All of the completed frames are then imported as bitmap files into the Agent character file.

A standard Microsoft Agent character will have over 80 different animations that it can perform, which does not include the number of branching animations used to provide the character with unpredictable responses. Currently I have put at least 40 work-hours into attempting to animate Foxee, and so far I have only achieved about 2/3 of a second’s worth of animation, which has yet to be pencil tested. I am hoping to improve and speed up my methods over time, but even with that in mind I still only expect to have 4 or 5 animations done by the end of the semester. This will be enough to create a working Agent character, but it will have very limited capabilities compared to those provided by Microsoft.

The Microsoft Agent engine will provide some of the back-end for Foxee, including the animation, input, and output functions for the character. However, the character must be part of a greater application, have a list of dialog and actions it can perform and understand, and must be programmed on how to interact with the user for each event. This will require a lot of Windows C coding with special header files provided by the Agent programming community. Having never used any of those header files nor written C programs for Windows before, the back-end will present its own set of challenges. The application being developed for Foxee will allow her to introduce herself to the class, explain and demonstrate many of her important features, and have her explain the principles behind her design and how she helps give computer users an enjoyable interactive computing experience.

Do to the enormous amount of time, research, drawing, digital coloring, and programming involved with this project; there is a large probability of unexpected problems causing my animation work to be abandoned. If animating Foxee proves to be too much of a challenge for me to be able to create an animated character before the project-deadline, a public domain Agent character will be substituted in her place to run on the C program back-end and perform the class demonstration. That way, the artwork part of this project will not jeopardize the C programming part, which will allow the programming part to be completed and meet the requirements of the class.