Save the Date: Raven Serenity Glover's MFA Oral Defense is set for April 4, 2024!
Raven Serenity joined the Department of Design in 2021 in the Digital Animation and Interactive Media track. They specialize in digital 3D animation, character modeling and Autodesk Maya, and they hope to further expand the utilization of animation to promote self-awareness and self-expression.
Committee Members:
Yvette Shen, Advisor
Shadrick Addy
Jesse Fox
Title: Sociable Creatures: An exploration of emergent narratives through behavioral animation and ecosystem dynamics.
Project Description:
This project investigates the development of a theoretical framework for using behavioral animation to digitally create autonomous entities, referred to as “social creatures”. These creatures are designed to develop distinct personalities influenced by their interactions with the environment and other co-existing social creatures. Such personalities significantly affect their desires and behavioral patterns. The project highlights the role of scarce resources within the digital environment as a crucial factor in fostering social interactions among the social creatures, thereby affecting their gathering points and interaction dynamics. A key feature is the creatures’ ability to form memories, enabling them to establish positive and negative relationships based on past interactions. This memory function enriches the creatures' experiences and interactions, leading to the creation of emergent narratives that are unique to each creature.
A video prototype has been developed to demonstrate the practical applications and potential outcomes of this theoretical framework. This prototype showcases the diverse possibilities and complex dynamics of the social creatures’ personalities, social interactions, memory formation, and emergent storytelling within the digital environment.
