OSSE: An open source socio-emotional simulator

In the last decade, emotion modeling has taken an increasing place in research in virtual agents and synthetic actors. One challenge is to be able to design believable characters that show a coherent behavior with respect to a personality. Much work has been done for virtual affective characters but, more recently, research has shown the importance of social relation and its tight relation with emotions. Not only the social context influence the emotional behavior of virtual characters, but also emotions do affect the social relations. As a consequence, when designing virtual characters with a believable socio-emotional behavior, one need to take into account the social context, the emotions and the personality. These three elements together represent the socio-emotional context. In this article, we present the Open-Source Socio Emotional (OSSE) simulator. This software was first designed in the context of game industry. It allows game designers to describe characters and scenes, as a set of emotional events, so as to study the dynamics of emotions and social relation among characters. In the next section, we briefly present the theoretical model that undergoes our system and we show how the different elements can be settled in the OSSE simulator. Last section illustrates the functionning of the OSSE simulator with a concrete example.