A new based-on-artificial-intelligence framework for behavioral animation of virtual actors

The realistic animation of the behavior of virtual actors emulating human beings has been a very dynamic field of research during the last few years. A major goal is to create a behavioral system for the virtual actors so that they behave as realistic as possible. Among the large number of different techniques to solve this problem, those based on artificial intelligence (AI) do represent a powerful (but not well explored yet) approach. In this paper, we present a new framework for behavioral animation of virtual actors. The framework applies several artificial intelligence techniques (neural networks, expert systems, fuzzy logic, K-means) to build a sophisticated behavioral system so that the actors can take intelligent decisions by themselves. The paper describes the general framework, its main components and how these AI techniques have been effectively applied to this purpose. Some programming issues, the main steps of the simulation flow and some illustrative examples are also analyzed in this paper.