Simulating Autonomous Virtual Humans

Research in virtual human simulation has seen a dramatic rise in recent years with widespread applicability in games, visual effects, education and urban simulations. Going forward, the problems we face are three-fold: First, a unified framework for efficiently simulating functional, purposeful autonomous virtual humans is yet to be realized. Second, it is particularly challenging to evaluate massive simulations of autonomous agents. Third, there exists no appropriate interface to allow end-users to author complex interactions between autonomous actors that populate the simulated environment. This book addresses the aforementioned challenges and presents a general framework for authoring, animating and, evaluating autonomous virtual human simulations.