Towards real time virtual human life simulations

We describe an approach to construct interactive virtual environments, which are suitable for the development of artificial virtual human life simulations. Our main goal is to have virtual human actors living and working autonomously in virtual environments. In our approach, virtual actors have their own motivations and needs, and by sensing and exploring their environment, an action selection mechanism is able to determine at anytime the suitable actions to take. We adapt basic actor motivations and needs to urban situations, where most actions involve interactions with the environment. Thus, a specific technique to define actor-object interactions is used, where pre-defined interaction plans are put inside interactive objects, and just selected during the simulation. We explain the steps taken in order to construct and animate such environments, and we also present a test simulation example