Abstract

Autonomous actors are able to have a behavior, which means they must have a manner of conducting themselves. Typically, the actor should perceive the objects and the other actors in the environment through virtual sensors: visual, tactile and auditory sensors. Based on the perceived information, the actorís behavioral mechanism will determine the actions he will perform. An actor may simply evolve in his environment or he may interact with this environment or even communicate with other actors. In this latter case, we will consider the actor as a interactive perceptive actor.

Summary of the project

The main goal in our approach is to build intelligent autonomous virtual humans or actors. By intelligent we mean that virtual humans are able to plan and execute tasks based on a model of the current state of the virtual world. By autonomous, we mean that actors do not require the continual intervention of a user. Our autonomous actors should react to their environment and take decisions based on perception systems, memory and reasoning. With such a system, we should be able to create simulations of situations such as virtual humans moving in a complex environment they may know and recognize, or playing ball games based on their visual and touching perception. To achieve our goals, actors should be able to move freely in the environment and change their motion in real-time. They should also perceive the environment through sensors. We already worked extensively on vision-based behavior; recently, we have generalized to various sensors and include production and reaction to sounds.

This project was sponsored by the "Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique".
 

Publications

H. Noser, D. Thalmann, The Animation of Autonomous Actors Based on Production Rules, Proc. Computer Animation '96, IEEE Computer
Society Press, June 1996, pp.47-57.Ý

N. Magnenat Thalmann, D.Thalmann, Digital Actors for Interactive Television, Proc. IEEE, Special Issue on Digital Television, Part 2, July
1995, pp.1022-1031.

H. Noser, D. Thalmann, Synthetic Vision and Audition for Digital Actors, Proc. Eurographics `95, Maastricht, August 1995, pp.325-336.

D. Thalmann, Virtual Sensors: A Key Tool for the Artificial Life of Virtual Actors, Proc. Pacific Graphics `95, Seoul, Korea.

H. Noser, O. Renault, D. Thalmann, N. Magnenat Thalmann, Navigation for Digital Actors based on Synthetic Vision, Memory and Learning, Computers and Graphics, Pergamon Press, Vol.19, No1, 1995, pp.7-19.

N.Magnenat Thalmann, D.Thalmann, The Artificial Life of Synthetic Actors, IEICE Transactions, Japan, invited paper, Vol. J76-D-II, No.8, 1993, pp.1506-1514.

D.Thalmann, Vision, Perception and Behaviour of Actors, Proc. BCS Conf. on Interacting with Images, British Computer Society, London, 1993

H.Noser, D.Thalmann Towards Autonomous Synthetic Actors, Proc. French-Japan Workshop on Synthetic Worlds, Aizu, Japan, 1993