Bolstered by a growing interest in simulating believable non-player characters (NPCs), work on NPC models has spanned topics such as planning, procedural storytelling, decision-making, and social dynamics. However, research groups work in isolation, …
This work expands on and extends work previously pubished for the Lyra System towards the Ph.D. Computer Science qualifier requirement at NC State University. We conducted a human-subjects study of Lyra to evaluate the generated conversations and …
The goal of this project is to model and study large populations of humans by simulating small-scale social interactions that take into account social influence dynamics. We aim to support a variety of applications, such as examining the implications of social science theories and developing playable, explorable story worlds.
Lyra is a simulation of a opinionated population of virtual characters with inherent biases that can believably debate politically-charged topics. We conducted a human-subjects study to evaluate these generated conversations and affinity groups for their believability and to inform future iterations of the simulation. We believe successful simulation of opinion change in social dynamics provides a foundation for computational recognition, prediction, and interfacing with humans.