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The simulation of the dynamics of human societies is not an easy task, and we propose a bottom-up approach, which consists in defining the human entity as a single, autonomous and independent entity (called Agent), and then immerse many of them in a common environment to let them interact and co-operate as the environment evolves. To achieve our goal and create Virtual Human societies, we try to extend...
Interactive virtual worlds provide a powerful medium for experiential learning. Intelligent virtual agents can cohabit virtual worlds with people and facilitate such learning as guides, mentors, and teammates. This paper reviews the main pedagogical advantages of animated agents in virtual worlds, discusses two key research challenges, and outlines an ambitious new project addressing those challenges.
This research discusses a new approach that uses patterns of a person’s eye motion to improve human computer interaction between intelligent virtual agents (IVA) and the people who interact with them. This approach adds new capability to current eye tracking interfaces that focus on eye fixations instead of patterns of motion. The analysis of eye motion on the pattern level can deliver three values...
In this paper we describe an emotional- behavioural architecture. The emotional engine is a higher layer than the behaviour system, and it can alter behaviour patterns, the engine is designed to simulate Emotionally-Intelligent Agents in a Virtual Environment, where each agent senses its own emotions, and other creature emotions through a virtual smell sensor; senses obstacles and other moving creatures...
In this paper, we consider the potential for reasoning about animations in the language of hybrid dynamical systems (i.e., systems with both continuous and discrete dynamics). We begin by directly applying hybrid systems theory to animation, using a general-purpose hybrid system specification tool to generate multi-agent animations; this application also illustrates that hybrid system models can provide...
We describe the architecture of an interactive, “believable” agent with personality, called user agent, which can act on behalf of a user in various multi-user game contexts, when she is not online. In a first step, information about the personality of the user is obtained from a questionnaire and then, in a second step, integrated in the reactive system of the user agent, part of which implements...
This paper presents a computational mind model for lifelike animated agents. It consists of a motivational system and an emotional system. The motivational system guides an agent’s behaviour by generating goals. The emotional system exerts further control over the agent’s behaviour by regulating and modulating the way that behaviour is undertaken. The mind model is embedded in a layered hierarchical...
The three-dimensional models used to embody intelligent agents are becoming increasingly realistic. We discuss two studies in which we embodied intelligently behaving virtual agents with photographically realistic models of human subjects‘ heads and faces. We then immersed those subjects with agents embodied with their virtual selves and compared their interactions and nonverbal behaviors to separate...
The principal advances in the research field of IVAs within virtual environments have taken place in the area of agent architectures. However, very few papers have addressed the development of metamodels to conceptualize this kind of systems from an organizational and social point of view, despite their intrinsic sociability and their close relationship to life-like virtual words. Likewise, no platform...
Intelligent multi-agent systems are currently used for a variety of purposes, both in research and for real-world applications. One of their most interesting, yet not fully explored uses, is as frameworks to support computerbased simulations of virtual worlds inhabited by life-like entities, that is, intelligent virtual environments, for purposes of education, demonstration and entertainment. This...
In the field of agents, there are a wide variety of them, such as learning agents, planning agents or communicative agents. One of the youngest members in the family are mobile agents, which provide us with the interesting feature of mobility in order to perform their tasks in different machines. In this paper, we will see some of the current uses of mobile agents and we will suggest how we could...
This paper is concerned with the evaluation of user embodiments in educational collaborative virtual environments by exploring an important aspect of interaction in virtual environments, namely the degree of ‘presence’ experienced by participants. Firstly, the influence of different avatar styles is examined using a specially designed prototype virtual art gallery. The choice of experimental procedure,...
In this paper we describe a fully implemented prototype for interactive storytelling using the Unreal™ engine. Using a sit-com like scenario as an example of how the dynamic interactions between agents and/or the user dramatise the emerging story. Hierarchical Task Networks (HTNs) are formalised using AND/OR graphs, which are used to describe the many possible variations of the story at a sub-goal...
This paper describes the development of Papous, a Virtual Storyteller. Our ultimate goal is to obtain a synthetic character that tells stories in an expressive and believable way, just as a real human storyteller would do. In this paper we describe the first version of Papous, our virtual storyteller. Papous can be seen as a virtual narrator who reads a text enriched with control tags. These tags...
We want to provide children, who have been shown to be highly skilled improvisers, with synthetic actors for interactive improvisational plays. Using a conflict oriented play structure we let them experience dramatic situations. Our Dramatised Actant Model maintains a dynamic balance between the opposing forces: a user-controlled avatar and several system characters. The model ensures there is a reasonable...
The InViWo project aims at providing high-level intuitive tools to describe virtual worlds populated with “intelligent” creatures and avatars. For this purpose, we have defined the Marvin language, which enables the high-level description of autonomous agent behaviours. In this paper, we present the underlying model we have designed, especially our agent and avatar architectures. We then present the...
In this paper, we present SimHuman, a platform for the generation of real-time 3D environments with virtual agents. SimHuman is highly dynamic and configurable, as it is not based on fixed scenes and models, and has an embedded physically based modelling engine. Its agents can use features such as path finding, inverse kinematics and planning to achieve their goals. The paper explains in detail design...
This paper describes MAgentA (Musical Agent Architecture), which is an Agent that automatically composes background music in real time using the emotional state of the environment within which it is embedded. Its goal is to generate a “film-like music” output for a virtual environment emphasizing the dramatic aspects of such environment. The approach followed in MAgentA is that of dynamically...
Agent-based simulation [1] is a powerful and natural way to carry out complex simulation experiments, in which many autonomous and interacting entities take part. The key abstraction in this methodology is the autonomous agent, which interacts with other agents via discrete events.
The paper argues that to build Multimodal IVAs it is necessary to provide them with the lexicons and alphabets of different communication systems, and it presents some attempts to find them out in symbolic gestures, gaze and touch.
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