A responsiveness metric for controllable characters

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical approach for measuring and characterizing the responsiveness of a character to changes in goal. Our approach is based on keeping track of the character's progress towards a frequently changing goal. A "distance-to-goal" function is defined to measure the progress. We then calculate an asymptotic proportion of the progress made towards the goal. Plotting this proportion for different frequencies of goal changes produces a responsiveness characteristic curve for the goal directed character. We use the responsiveness characteristics to compare three interactive locomotion approaches. We illustrate how the metric can be used to tune and optimize the responsiveness of a character.