Dynamically simulated characters in virtual environments

Animated characters can play the role of teachers or guides, team mates or competitors, or just provide a source of interesting motion in virtual environments. Characters in a compelling virtual environment must have a variety of complex and interesting behaviors, and be responsive to the user´s actions. The difficulty of constructing such synthetic characters currently hinders the development of these environments, particularly when realism is required. The authors present one approach to populating virtual environments-using dynamic simulation to generate the motion of characters. They explore this approach´s effectiveness with two virtual environments: the border collie environment, in which the user acts as a border collie to herd robots into a corral, and the Olympic bicycle race environment, in which the user participates in a bicycle race with synthetic competitors