Agents + behavior

Sometimes one of the most difficult things to achieve when you create an animation or an interactive application, is to make people feel related or somehow connected to the environment and characters that are being displayed on the screen. As developers and animators there is always a deep intention to generate links between our work and the audience and most of the times this task may become harder than we expect.

to create a connection we may draw upon the user's likes in music and esthetics, what they feel curious about, their memories and opinions, their beliefs and we may even explode their deepest needs for company and comprehension. As long as we can create a new experience for them that satisfies a particular purpose, there is almost no limits to the media and tools we could use.

It seems that the closer the interaction is between the user and the element that compose an specific application or animation, the easier it is to become attached to a particular agent. This is being stimulated by the use of innovative technologies, such as virtual reality, immersive media and augmented reality, that actually converge the use of images, sound, touch and sometimes smell to create interactive multimedia experiences. 

Since this is a field which is in continuous development, some of the research made in this area is still experimental and by this, some amazing and really creative results are developed by artists, engineers and programmers who use different resources to engage the users into a new experience. They create agents that have no specific shape, others may have a cartoonish look and some try to simulate in almost every aspect the human figure and behavior. Like these examples there could be as many types of agents as they are of users.

Depending on the target and the purpose of the interactive application, animation or any media that is being used, the developers try to attract a specific grout of users, and the behavior of the agents is driven by a variety of  elements such as sound, movement,  pre-arranged instructions, random behavior and many different values offered from the environment.

An example of the use of smell to create a more interactive and immersive experience is the Sensory Acumen's gaming product GameSkunk. Though this may be a technology that is still in development and has no common or regular use, it might be a new step in interactive applications that encourages the link between the users and the agents of the application.

Note: I apologize for my English. I'm Working hard to improve it.