  Embodied avatars as virtual agents have many applications and provide
benefits over disembodied agents, allowing non-verbal social and interactional
cues to be leveraged, in a similar manner to how humans interact with each
other. We present an open embodied avatar built upon the Unreal Engine that can
be controlled via a simple python programming interface. The avatar has lip
syncing (phoneme control), head gesture and facial expression (using either
facial action units or cardinal emotion categories) capabilities. We release
code and models to illustrate how the avatar can be controlled like a puppet or
used to create a simple conversational agent using public application
programming interfaces (APIs). GITHUB link:
https://github.com/danmcduff/AvatarSim
