A New Architecture for Simulating the Behavior of Virtual Agents

Abstract

This paper focuses on modeling the behavior of virtual agents living in a virtual 3D world. Our aim is to apply the most typical human behavior features to our virtual agents so that they behave as realistic as possible. To this end, a new architecture for the behavioral engine that incorporates a number of these typical characteristics of human behavior is introduced. This new proposal allows the virtual agents to interact among them and with the environment in a quite realistic way. The main features of this new architecture, such as perception, knowledge management, motion control and action selection (using internal states, world information, goals, and others) are carefully analyzed in the paper. Finally, some relevant functions (those describing sensations such as tiredness, agent's resistance and recovery capacities, happiness and anxiety) and parameters (those determining the vision range or sociability) are also described in the paper.

A New Framework for Intelligent Semantic Web Services Based on GAIVAs

“…Fortunately, much research work has recently been done on the development of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for the Web. Recent approaches include multimodal interfaces (Feiner & McKeown, 1991;Oviatt, 1999), conversational models (Takeuchi & Nagao, 1993;Prevost, Hodgson, Cook, & Churchill, 1999;Thorisson, 1996), virtual humans (Caicedo & Thalmann, 2000;Monzani, Caicedo, & Thalmann, 2001;Thalmann & Monzani, 2002;Luengo & Iglesias, 2003;Iglesias & Luengo, 2004;Iglesias & Luengo, 2005;Iglesias & Luengo, 2007) and embodied agents (Cassell & Vilhjalmsonn, 1999;Cassell, Bickmore, Campbell, Vilhjalmsson, & Yan, 2001), to quote just a few examples. In addition, there has been an increasing interest on the analysis of their potential advantages and limitations in comparison to text-based approaches.…”

AI Framework for Decision Modeling in Behavioral Animation of Virtual Avatars

“…The realistic simulation and animation of the behavior of virtual avatars emulating human beings (also known as Artificial Life) has attracted much attention during the last few years [2,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. A major goal in behavioral animation is the construction of an "intelligent" system able to integrate the different techniques required for the realistic simulation of the behavior of virtual humans.…”

Framework for Simulating the Human Behavior for Intelligent Virtual Agents. Part I: Framework Architecture

“…This is the first in a series of two papers (both included in this volume) describing a new framework for simulating the human behavior for intelligent virtual agents. Although originally based on that introduced in [10], the current framework incorporates so many additions and improvements that it can actually be considered as a new one. Its new features concern fundamentally to the architecture and the behavioral engine.…”

“…In a previous paper [10] the authors presented a new behavioral framework able to reproduce a number of the typical features of the human behavior. The system allows the IVAs to interact among them and with the environment in a quite realistic way.…”