Sgt. Star, a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. Army, answers questions about life as a soldier, his marriage to Mrs. Star and his favorite field ration meal.

He’s not a real human. He lives on the Army’s Web site, as an avatar, and is so popular among online visitors that the Army has commissioned USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies to create him as a virtual human being.

Institute for Creative Technologies, which created the Web version of Sgt. Star last year, is in the process of building a three-dimensional version of the soldier to be unveiled in October at the Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington D.C.

Sgt. Star will be a more sophisticated and less playful version of Sgt. John Blackwell, a prototype virtual human the Institute designed for the Army a few years ago. Sgt. Blackwell has most recently charmed teenagers interning on Capital Hill and chatted up visitors at Smithsonian’s design exhibition in New York City.

“I knew we had succeeded at the Army science conference in 2004, when there were people who were saying goodbye to the character before they walked away,” said Diane Piepol, project director at the Institute.

Sgt. Star will look as real as Sgt. Blackwell, who appears life size on a translucent screen where motion-capture sessions give him a natural motion, body sway and breathing rhythm. The 3-D version of Sgt. Star is based on the face and the stature of an Army captain who modeled for its digital creation.

Sgt. Star will have a wider range of hand motions than Sgt. Blackwell, said Piepol, who heads up the project, and will be equipped with a database full of exhaustive information about the Army. Voice-recognition software matches keywords in any given question with the database to form answers pre-recorded by a voice actor.

Lighter touch

The personality of Sgt. Star will remain the same as his Web character, who is generally stoic when he responds to a question about why anyone should join the army.

In a voice-activated online chat session, he says, “The U.S. Army is the strongest, most respected and feared ground force in the world.”

But when posed with a more personal question such as whether he has family he’s more lighthearted. “I am married. Mrs. Star is my boss.”

His favorite food? “I am partial to Captains Country Chicken MRE’s. They’re MMMMM good.”

Paula Spilman, an information technology project manager for the U.S. Army Accessions Command, said visitors spend an average of 17 minutes chatting with Sgt. Star on GoArmy.com, nearly four times the average amount of time visitors spend on the Web site. Sgt. Star chats with an average of 500 visitors a day and answers questions correctly 92 percent of the time.

“We’ve had great success with the Sgt. Star Web character and we’re taking him to the next level,” Spilman said. “We want to tell people about the army but people may be leery of talking to a recruiter. We’re hoping Sgt. Star will be a non-threatening source of information.”

It’s also another way to give the public a taste of the kind of cutting edge technology the Army uses to train its soldiers, Spilman said.

For example, as a part of a training program to teach negotiating techniques, the Army uses a simulated environment created by USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies where the player negotiates with a virtual Iraqi physician about moving a medical center out of a battle zone.

“It seems odd that we should need computers to teach us about how to talk to people,” said Jonathan Gratch, co-director of the Institute for Creative Technologies.

But negotiating techniques are mostly taught through role playing, and hiring people to pretend to be an Iraqi physician, for example, is expensive, he said.

Consistency is another factor. Computer simulations will replicate the exact same situation for every trainee. Role-playing, on the other hand, is wrought with variables, Gratch said.

The Institute’s simulated teaching tool for negotiating is currently being updated with more sophisticated technology where virtual humans would react not only to words, but also intonations, emotions and facial expressions. This project, along with others that include a virtual war video game created to help veterans cope with post-traumatic stress disorder, are funded by the Institute’s 5-year contract with the U.S. Army that works out to about $15 million a year, Gratch said.

Business applications?

It’s the type of technology the business community is interested in, said Dean Hovey, president of Comprendo LLC, a consulting firm for healthcare companies. He was one of about a dozen business executives who recently toured the studios of the Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina Del Rey.

After watching negotiation techniques played out in the virtual Iraqi medical center on a giant translucent screen, Hovey said he would be interested in using the same technology to train young doctors about bedside manners and protocols in emergency rooms.

Virtual humans will be in day-to-day commerce sooner than later, said Dan Lejerskar, chairman of Irvine-based EON Reality Inc., an interactive 3-D software provider. He believes digital simulation will change the way consumers conduct business by the year 2010.

The company recently unveiled technology that enables people to create 3-D online images of themselves from photographs.

“Consumers crave user-generated experiences that combine virtual reality technology with physical location-based events to produce totally immersive 3-D interactive experiences,” Lejerskar said. “Within three years, we’ll see radical changes to how we shop, learn and communicate with business associates, friends and family.”

For now, however, the virtual human technology is entrenched in mostly academic research. Piepol at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies said it could be years before characters like Sgt. Star and Sgt. Blackwell find mass commercial application.

“Marketers have approached us about setting up a virtual human in the lobby of an ad agency and there have been talks about creating a virtual guide in a museum or a teller at a bank,” Piepol said. “But it’s still a challenge to make it cost-effective for commercial use.”