Modeling the Personal Space of Virtual Agents for Behavior Simulation

In this paper we propose a mathematical model for the concept of personal space (PS) and apply it to simulate the non-verbal communication between agents in virtual worlds. The distance between two persons reflects the type of their relationship. Human-like autonomous virtual agents should be equipped with such capability to simulate natural interactions. We define three types of relationships; (1) stranger relationship, (2) business relationship, and (3) friendly relationship. First we model the space around an agent as a probability distribution function which reflects at each point in the space the importance of that point to the agent. The agent updates dynamically this function according to(1) his relation with the other agent, (2) his face orientation, and(3) the evolution of the relationship over time as a stranger agent may become a friend. We demonstrate the concept on a multi-agent platform and show that space-aware agents exhibit better natural behavior.