NECA_Project
The NECA Project (Net Environment for Embodied Emotional Conversational Agents) was a research project that focused on multimodal communication with animated agents in a virtual world. NECA was funded by the European Commission from 1998 to 2002 and the research results were published up to 2005.[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]