All together now: Introducing the virtual human toolkit

Abstract

Abstract. While virtual humans are proven tools for training, education and re-search, they are far from realizing their full potential. Advances are needed in indi-vidual capabilities, such as character animation and speech synthesis, but perhaps more importantly, fundamental questions remain as to how best to integrate these capabilities into a single framework that allows us to efficiently create characters that can engage users in meaningful and realistic social interactions. This integration re-quires in-depth, inter-disciplinary understanding few individuals, or even teams of individuals, possess. We help address this challenge by introducing the ICT Virtual Human Toolkit1, which offers a flexible framework for exploring a variety of differ-ent types of virtual human systems, from virtual listeners and question-answering characters to virtual role-players. We show that due to its modularity, the Toolkit allows researchers to mix and match provided capabilities with their own, lowering the barrier of entry to this multi-disciplinary research challenge.