[1][2][3] The project focused on communication between animated agents in a virtual world, using characters that exhibit realistic personality traits and natural looking behavior that reflects the emotional features of conversations.
The project goal was to combine different research efforts such as situation-based natural language and speech generation, representation of non-verbal expression, and the modeling of emotions and personality.
[1][4][5] The underlying research direction of the NECA Project was the development of a computing platform in which animated characters within a virtual world could be capable of realistic behavior.
For character interactions to look natural, various factors such the proxemics of the distance between their bodies as they interact, to the kinesics of body language at the individual level, and the level of eye contact between individuals, as well as the paralinguistics of tone and intonation of sentences had to be considered.
[1] The third component was eShowRoom as an e-commerce platform demonstration that allowed for the display of products in the commercial domain.