The NECA (Net Environment for Embodied Emotional Conversational Agents) framework within which RRL was developed was not oriented towards the animation of movies, but the creation of intelligent "virtual characters" that interact within a virtual world and hold conversations with emotional content, coupled with suitable facial expressions.
The representation of these scenes requires multiple information types such as body postures, facial expressions, semantic content and meaning of conversations, etc.
[3] A key goal in the design of RRL was the ease of development, to make scenes and interaction construction available to users without advanced knowledge of programming.
The generation of natural flow in a conversation requires a high degree of representational power for the emotional elements.
The speech synthesis component must operate before the gesture assignment system because it includes the timing information for the spoken words and emotional interjections.
After interpreting the natural language text to be spoken, this component adds prosodic structure such as rhythm, stress and intonations.
A number of specific commands support the display a wide range of emotions in the faces of animated characters.