End-User Programming of 3D Virtual Agents

3D interactive environments filled with compelling characters are becoming part of our everyday lives. For example, 3D graphical scenes are common in video games, advertisements, and movies. However, the uses of the characters in these environments have been explored in only a limited way. We would like to significantly increase the utility of animated characters in such environments with respect to effective education and training. In this project, we aim to advance the state of the art in end-user programming by supporting the development of 3D animated content by end users for the purpose of training other users. In particular, we are interested in strategy-oriented programming in virtual worlds, in which synthetic characters are programmed to select and execute appropriate strategies. The purpose is to support domain experts in creating the characters´ content for virtual training environments, such as for emergency personnel training or educational simulations, without requiring the content creators to have prior knowledge of computer science or animation. We propose to support end users in programming these synthetic characters as directly as possible, by sketching and demonstrating desirable behaviors with characters from their own problem domains. For example, a football coach might create animated synthetic players and implicitly train them to have complex strategies and behaviors. These synthetic agents will be used to train humans in complex strategies and behaviors by having them play against and with each other. Similar virtual environments can be used to train firefighters, military personnel, emergency workers, and children learning problem-solving skills via educational simulations