Agents in annotated worlds

Abstract

Virtual worlds offer great potential as environments for education, entertainment, and collaborative work. Agents that function effectively in heterogeneous virtual spaces must have the ability to acquire new behaviors and useful semantic information from those contexts. The human-computer interaction literature discusses how to construct spaces and objects that provide "knowledge in the world" that aids human beings to perform these tasks. In this paper, we describe how to build comparable annotated environments containing explanations of the purpose and uses of spaces and activities that allow agents quickly to become intelligent actors in those spaces. Examples are provided from our application domain, believable agents acting as inhabitants and guides in a children's exploratory world. Keywords: believability, human-like qualities of synthetic agents, synthetic agents 1. Introduction Today's virtual environments present opportunities for simulation and interaction involving ma...