Integrated Virtual Humans

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Building embodied virtual humans is a complex multi-disciplinary effort that requires many components to be connected together. Additionally there is a great need to support both the research and the transition of this technology. To this end a common general architecture was researched and developed for the overall virtual human research and development effort.

The architecture allows researchers to further understand all of the intricate interconnections between the various components in the system, to test their components with the system as a whole and to facilitate interesting synergies between the various research groups.

To demonstrate the virtual human system and its research components, a series of large interactive, immersive, virtual training environment prototypes have been created, in which trainees can take on various roles within a Stability and Support Operations (SASO) scenario. In SASO, a trainee uses natural language to interact with life-sized virtual human agents to perform a negotiation task consisting of moving a clinic out of harm's way.

To showcase how this basic research results in transitioned technology, the ICT has developed the Virtual Human Toolkit. The toolkit is a collection of modules, tools and libraries that allow users, authors and developers to create their own virtual humans. The toolkit is available free of cost for academic researches and provides a solid technical foundation and modularity that allows a relatively easy way of mixing and matching toolkit technology with a research project's proprietary or 3rd-party software. Through this toolkit, ICT hopes to provide the virtual humans research community with a widely accepted platform on which new technologies can be built. See http://vhtoolkit.ict.usc.edu for more details.

This project differs from others in the following ways:

It is comprehensive in integrating all of the various components required to build Virtual Human agents and embedding them into virtual and real environments. (Few projects attempt to bring together so many pieces of technology.)
It provides a an architecture and framework for the implementation of a wide range of virtual humans.
It is highly interactive. Users interact with a life-sized virtual human naturally with multi-modal input in an immersive environment.
It contains full-body avatars. The virtual humans consists of a complete virtual body, with facial expressions, non-verbal behavior, walking and motion, speech input and output, emotion modeling, decision making and goal-directed behavior.
It allows multi-party interactions. The immersive environment is capable of supporting multiple virtual humans and multiple users in the same virtual world.
It is a dynamic environment. The virtual world can be modified internally by the agents or externally by a user or trainer for more story-oriented scenarios.

Tags: architecture, human, immersive, prototype, scenario, virtual, virtual humans

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Team

Contact

Arno Hartholt,

Goals

Develop a general virtual human architecture to be used by all projects that are developing virtual humans. The architecture should be plug and play, distributed and flexible. Additionally a common set of messages developed in conjunction with international research groups is used between the components. See Figure 3 for the architecture. These tasks will research new ideas, improve and enhance the architecture and to investigate designs or components that will allow the virtual humans to be utilized better for training purposes.
To develop a suite of tools called the Virtual Human Toolkit, which also includes the architecture. This set of tools for both developers and end users facilitate building virtual humans for different domains and automate some of the hard tasks of creating the knowledge and tasks for the characters.
To develop knowledge, tasks, goals, verbal ad non-verbal behavior for new and exciting domains for entertainment, teaching and military training.
To support the integration and testing of the whole virtual human system and supporting research components.
Support the construction of virtual environments with all the components required to support interaction with Virtual Human agents, including vision and speech of the trainee or user.

Institute for Creative Technologies