An interactive environment for the visual programming of virtual agents

In virtual reality interfaces, human/computer interaction is supported by the engagement of the user within the emulated replica of some real-life environment. To attain this engagement, the virtual agents which populate the virtual environment must be animated so as to exhibit realistic behavioral patterns. The specification of such behavioral patterns is largely hurdled by the human difficulty in providing abstract descriptions for real-life phenomena. Visual programming by-example provides a straightforward means to overcome this hurdle: following this specification approach, the behavioral pattern of a virtual agent can be defined through examples which replicate the agent behavior in response to the stimuli that it may receive from its embedding virtual environment. A system is presented which supports the specification by-example of agent behavioral models and their automatic translation into code. The internal specification formalism which is used by the system to capture the behavioral patterns exhibited by the agents in their specification examples is discussed, along with the overall organization and the visual interface of the system