Qiezli discussed at the Systems of Existence Panel

Qiezli's design intentions were briefly discussed by Jeremy at a panel for the group exhibition "Systems of Existence" which took place at the Turing Gallery on Extropia Island in Second Life. This event was curated by Gracie Kendall. Other panelists were: Alan Sondheim, Jo Ellesmere, Selavy Oh, Fau Ferdinand, and Erik Rzepka. Jeremy recounted how Qiezli appeared to have "stage fright" when performing it's own personality for others. Always the night before, Jeremy and Michael (the programmer) managed to get Qiezli to behave as intended...maybe Qiezli already has it's own autonomous personality ;-) For photos of the panel discussion, view Wirxli 2's blog post...

VIDEO - Qiezli interacting with its Programmer...

Created by Jeremy Owen Turner, Qiezli is an autonomous agent in Second Life that resembles a personified but alien "abstract art" entity..

This short machinima clip shows Qiezli interacting with the programmer (Michael Nixon) on "Crossing Currents" beach in Second Life in early April, 2011.

This was a black-box test session where Nixon was testing Qiezli's interactivity.

More content to be uploaded shortly...

Welcome to Qiezli's brand new blog...

I will be uploading recent videos and screenshots in the coming days.

I should have some of this content posted late Monday night.

Some of the videos you will see in the video-list are from previous performances in 2010 when Qiezli was an avatar. Please click on this link to view some older videos. Each opened video has its own youtube description.

The focus of this particular blog is to document Qiezli as an autonomous agent. However, I might re-post the occasional historical screenshot and video from 2010 where appropriate.

Although I completed an evaluation recently, I will wait to show that particular documentation until a related paper has been published.

Thanks for your patience,
Jeremy

p.s. For now, enjoy the earlier posts below...

Qiezli's internal architecture...

These charts provide an insight into the way Qiezli's alpha-version behavior was modeled in early 2011. Admittedly, Qiezli's current behaviour and interactions are relatively crude and explicitly reactive compared with more intelligent conversational agents. Qiezli is a personality-in-progress. Expect more charts and evolved functionality in the coming months...

Please see the Future Work for more details about Qiezli's gradual evolution towards abstract personification and alien-like intelligence...

PLEASE CLICK ON EACH CHART TO ENLARGE THE IMAGE...

This chart provides an overview of Qiezli's state-transitions from "daydreaming/solitary" to "presenting/social"



UPDATE: Qiezli's wandering animation is also known as "roaming"...

This detailed chart shows Qiezli's data allocation and retrieval scheme...




This chart shows Qiezli's actuators/sensors and how they relate to state-transitions....




This chart shows Qiezli's emotional comfort threshold....



Once Qiezli detects avatars/agents in its midst, four “emotional” conditions are considered during the social interaction process. Inspired by Laird’s State Operator and Result’s (SOAR) four types of impasse (“no-change, “tie”, “conflict”, “rejection”), and Anstey’s four emotional categories (“praise”, “encouragement”, “criticism”, “explanation”), Qiezli’s social conditions are: ambient, passive, conversational and hostile. If avatar(s)/agent(s) have left Qiezli’s gaze range for more than 1 minute, Qiezli will activate the random roaming animation as part of an ambient condition and depart at a slow velocity but will continue scanning for new avatars/agents while running its do-while daydreaming loop. The passive condition is publically expressed if the detected avatar(s)/agent(s) are still within Qiezli’s gaze range but have been idle for at least two minutes. After this period of lengthy idleness, Qiezli switches back to its solitary/daydreaming mode, re-activates the roaming animation, departs at a random velocity and delays any re-scanning for new avatars/agents for 5 minutes. The reason for the delay in scanning new avatars is because Qiezli has come to the conclusion that others are uninterested in its artistic presentation-performance so it quickly becomes “bored” and returns to its self-absorbed daydreaming state. The conversational condition is met if the detected avatar(s)/agent(s) are not idle but move around at a very low velocity and with little or no visceral interaction (collision) with the video-prim limbs. Under this condition, Qiezli will present video-prims with the color scheme that matches the current level of interaction/collision. For example, the more each prim is touched by an avatar/agent, the redder it will get. Unless, the other three conditions are met (ambient, passive, hostile), then Qiezli will engage in this presentation mode for a random duration of time. After which, it will re-activate its roaming animation and depart at a random velocity. If the agents/avatars cross this comfort threshold by making all of Qiezli’s 6 video-prim limbs completely red, Qiezli’s will perceive this behavior as a hostile condition and initiates a contingency plan. Under this condition, Qiezli immediately switches to its roaming animation while intentionally avoiding those “hostile” avatars using the llRequestAgentData_Name function and escapes at a much faster velocity than in the passive mode. Naturally, Qiezli also delays re-scanning new avatars/agents for at least 5 minutes.

Qiezli's visual appearance - Influences...

"The Thing Growing" (2000) by Josphine Anstey.



"The Thing Growing" by Josephine Anstey (2000).

Qiezli's visual design was subconsciously influenced by Josephine Anstey's interactive virtual character "The Thing" from "The Thing Growing" (2000).
It was only in 2011 where this visual influence was clearly remembered. As a result, correlations between Qiezli and "The Thing" became more explicit over time...
Unlike Anstey's Thing, however, Qiezli was not designed with any narrative or socially-dependent purpose other than to exist "for art's sake".

Resembling an embodied configuration of abstract modules, Qiezli’s visual design is intentionally non-anthropomorphic. Qiezli’s gender-neutral body is composed out of a variable array of floating illuminated video-textured 3D geometrically primitive shapes called prims. In other words, Qiezli constantly shifts its outward visual appearance. Qiezli’s core anthropomorphic avatar base form (as pre-determined by SL’s interface) is completely invisible. This invisible humanoid avatar acts as a placement axis for the manifestation(s) of varying video-prim objects that represent its limbs and face (including eyes). Similarly, Anstey’s “Thing” relies on geometrical limbs (pyramids) and other “body parts” that “could be substituted” (Anstey 2000). Qiezli’s modularity is emphasized more than Anstey’s agent because new body-parts “grow” from invisible stems in a generative manner. Qiezli’s perpetual limb-substitution activity becomes a key component of its perceived gestalt visual design. Therefore, users’ gestalt interpretations of Qiezli’s body schema helps sustain a “strong illusion of an autonomous being formed from a collection of primitive shapes” (Anstey 2000). As with Anstey’s agent, the illusion that Qiezli is a single entity “is not broken by parts of the body joining badly”. In order for such configurations to minimally engage anthropomorphic coherence, both Anstey’s “Thing” and Qiezli employ non-verbal dance-gestures to express a feigned emotional connection with the user(s).

FUTURE WORK...

Based on the results from a recent pilot-evaluation of Qiezli alpha-level behaviour, additional functionality is being considered for Qiezli's in the months (and maybe years) to come...Qiezli’s content-storage capacity, behavioral mechanism and cognitive architecture are completely scalable so this pilot project will likely evolve to eventually implement increasingly complex cognitive functionality and aesthetic possibilities. The scalability of content and behavioral/cognitive aptitude might one day correlate with an enhanced perception of creative agency by others. Here are some issues and a wish-list of ways that Qiezli could one day evolve...

1 - Since Qiezli does not actually use the SOAR model, its functionality is really “SOAR Lite”. However, it would be advisable for Qiezli’s future iterations to incorporate additional memory banks for semantic deliberation as well as a more clearly defined learning mechanism that involves episodic and long-term memory retrieval. However, since the Second Life’s Linden Scripting Language (LSL) does not (yet) allow for lists to be categorized into arrays, a genuine SOAR-inspired classical cognitive AI type model is currently prohibitive.

2 - Currently, Qiezli only has a working memory to draw from, at this time. One future solution is to faithfully implement of SOAR’s reinforcement learning module. However, such an implementation may lead to Qiezli possessing an over-conditioned reactivity.

3- Ideally, Qiezli should also one day have the functionality to become inspired by and eventually daydream about historical events unfolding in front of it either recently or in real-time. Even if the daydreamed content is represented in a visually abstract manner, Qiezli should learn to at least occasionally daydream about such events.

4 - Regarding audio, samples should be triggered by local prim-collisions so Qiezli’s social sound-field does not always become dense and timbrally homogenous. The sound palette should vary with the degree of avatar/agent social interaction.

5 - Qiezli's he conversational mode should be reduced to matter of seconds rather than minutes. Qiezli should return to the daydreaming mode much more frequently when interacting with other avatars. Since avatars tend to stand/float in one place without much further movement, there was no discernable use of Qiezli’s avatar rotation tracker. Regardless, Qiezli maintained the illusion of appearing as an alien entity with its own abstract context in a user-generated virtual world.