Section: Application Domains

Autonomous Characters

Autonomous characters are becoming more and more popular as they are used in an increasing number of application domains. In the field of special effects, virtual characters are used to replace secondary actors and generate highly populated scenes that would be hard and costly to produce with real actors. In video games and virtual storytelling, autonomous characters play the role of actors that are driven by a scenario. Their autonomy allows them to react to unpredictable user interactions and adapt their behavior accordingly. In the field of simulation, autonomous characters are used to simulate the behavior of humans in different kind of situations. They enable to study new situations and their possible outcomes.

One of the main challenges in the field of autonomous characters is to provide a unified architecture for the modeling of their behavior. This architecture includes perception, action and decisional parts. This decisional part needs to mix different kinds of models, acting at different time scale and working with different nature of data, ranging from numerical (motion control, reactive behaviors) to symbolic (goal oriented behaviors, reasoning about actions and changes).

In the MimeTIC team, we focus on autonomous virtual humans. Our problem is not to reproduce the human intelligence but to propose an architecture making it possible to model credible behaviors of anthropomorphic virtual actors evolving/moving in real time in virtual worlds. The latter can represent particular situations studied by psychologists of the behavior or to correspond to an imaginary universe described by a scenario writer. The proposed architecture should mimic all the human intellectual and physical functions.