Technology Looks To Advance Simulated Conversation In Video Games
by Chad Lakkis on October 23, 2007 at 11:32 pm
You catch the ball with your hands. These are called hands. You follow?
We posted some news a while back about the possibility that EA was secretly working on another NFL Head Coach game. It generated a buzz, and today we received a message from someone regarding the story.
A gentleman by the name of Mark Smith, of SIMmersion LLC, located in Columbia Maryland, asked for some help getting in touch with EA Tiburon regarding a product his company created that he believed could help make a sequel to the NFL Head Coach game much better than its predecessor.
We were obviously interested in finding out more, so we clicked on the link he supplied in his correspondence. After digging around for a bit and making our way through the site we found a link that said “click here for a demonstration” — so we did.
We watched as a woman wearing a headset device conducted a conversation with an a man via her laptop. What is so special about a webcam conversation over the internet we thought? Not even close. As it turns out, what we were in fact watching was an individual undergoing training by conducting an interrogation with a simulated person.
So here is how it apparently works, there is a vast database of responses which are linked directly to video clips of live actors giving each response. The same response could be contained in the database with hundreds of slight variations in delivery and or body movement. You ask a question and the voice recognition software kicks in, processes what you said, goes into the database, grabs a response and plays the corresponding video that relates.
In the interrogation example above, the video actor may shrug his shoulders a bit and change his eye movement ever so slightly as he answers yes, it would then be your responsibility to process what you saw and heard, determine the validity, and then decide what you want to say or ask next. The site claims that each conversation with one of their many simulations can currently last up to an hour.
At first we did not believe the site or the product was for real, as several of the sites pages came up blank while clicking around, so we clicked on over to their “in the news” section (which worked), and sure enough, it had been mentioned in several publications, however the latest mention was November of 2006.
If this technology were to be applied to a game such as NFL Head Coach 2, it could very well be used to fix the repetitive and mundane conversations we all suffered through in our attempt to enjoy the original. Imagine being able to sit down with a current player to talk about his availability on Sunday, reading his body langauge as he says “my knee is fine coach”, or being able to analyze the look in a free agents eyes and decide if he is really a good fit for your team. Will he help us win a championship, or tear our team apart? Such a level of realism has yet to be achieved in a game, and it would be amazing to see the day when it finally does.
Check out the video demonstration of SIMmersion’s Simulated People technology at www.simmersion.com and be sure to report back and let us know what you think.
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on March 11, 2008 2:47 pm
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