A new collaborative environnient has been constructed recently. in which a human-shaped virtual agent can comm.unicate with a real human through both verbal and nonoerbal ways. The collaborative environment is very promising as the nezt generation communication environment, but there exists a problem the workload for the construction is too large for the practical use. In this study, the system for siinulating the collaborative environment is divided into several subsystems according to its function: and for each subsystem a new constmction method to reduce the constmction workload has been. developed individually. In this paper, newly developed construction methods are described such as an object-oriented method for constructing virtual spaces, an affurdance-based body motion synthesizing method and a modeling method of the virtual agent's behavior using Petri-net.

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The objective of this study is related with an on-going project "Virtual Collaborator" which is a sort of "virtual robot" that behaves like human in virtual environment. In conjunction with the Virtual Collaborator Project, an experimental study was conducted with the purpose of exploiting more efficient method of natural human walking phantom. The study consists of crosscorrelation analysis for a selected pair of body parts of the phantom's walk motion and subjective rating by persons observation by showing them various sets of phantom walking animation. Then, an efficient method of synthesizing animation of natural human walking is proposed.