An Extendable Multiagent Model for Behavioural Animation

This paper presents a framework for visually simulating the behaviour of actors in virtual environments. In principle, the environmental interaction follows a cyclic processing of perception, decision, and action. As natural life-forms perceive their environment by active sensing, our approach also tends to let the artificial actor actively sense the virtual world. This allows us to place the characters in non-preprocessed virtual dynamic environments, what we call generic environments. A main aspect within our framework is the strict distinction between a behaviour pattern, that we term model, and its instances, named characters, which use the pattern. This allows them sharing one or more behaviour models. Low-level tasks like sensing or acting are took over by so called subagents, which are subordinated modules extendedly plugged in the character. In a demonstration we exemplarily show the application of our framework. We place the same character in different environments and let it climb and descend stairs, ramps and hills autonomously. Additionally the reactiveness for moving objects is tested. In future, this approach shall go into action for a simulation of an urban environment

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Feeling crowded yet?: Crowd simulations for VR

With advances in virtual reality technology and its multiple applications, the need for believable, immersive virtual environments is increasing. Even though current computer graphics methods allow us to develop highly realistic virtual worlds, the main element failing to enhance presence is autonomous groups of human inhabitants. A great number of crowd simulation techniques have emerged in the last decade, but critical details in the crowd's movements and appearance do not meet the standards necessary to convince VR participants that they are present in a real crowd. In this paper, we review recent advances in the creation of immersive virtual crowds and discuss areas that require further work to turn these simulations into more fully immersive and believable experiences.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A Grammatical Approach to the Modeling of an Autonomous Robot

Virtual Worlds Generator is a grammatical model that is proposed to define virtual worlds. It integrates the diversity of sensors and interaction devices, multimodality and a virtual simulation system. Its grammar allows the definition and abstraction in symbols strings of the scenes of the virtual world, independently of the hardware that is used to represent the world or to interact with it. A case study is presented to explain how to use the proposed model to formalize a robot navigation system with multimodal perception and a hybrid control scheme of the robot. The result is an instance of the model grammar that implements the robotic system and is independent of the sensing devices used for perception and interaction. As a conclusion the Virtual Worlds Generator adds value in the simulation of virtual worlds since the definition can be done formally and independently of the peculiarities of the supporting devices

Towards Learning ‘Self’ and Emotional Knowledge in Social and Cultural Human-Agent Interactions

Original article can be found at: http://www.igi-global.com/articles/details.asp?ID=35052 Copyright IGI. Posted by permission of the publisher.This article presents research towards the development of a virtual learning environment (VLE) inhabited by intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and modeling a scenario of inter-cultural interactions. The ultimate aim of this VLE is to allow users to reflect upon and learn about intercultural communication and collaboration. Rather than predefining the interactions among the virtual agents and scripting the possible interactions afforded by this environment, we pursue a bottomup approach whereby inter-cultural communication emerges from interactions with and among autonomous agents and the user(s). The intelligent virtual agents that are inhabiting this environment are expected to be able to broaden their knowledge about the world and other agents, which may be of different cultural backgrounds, through interactions. This work is part of a collaborative effort within a European research project called eCIRCUS. Specifically, this article focuses on our continuing research concerned with emotional knowledge learning in autobiographic social agents.Peer reviewe