Creating three-dimensional animated human behaviors for virtual worlds

Creating virtual scenarios that simulate a substantial human population with typical and varied behaviors can be an overwhelming task. In addition to modeling the environment and characters, tagging the environment with semantic data, and creating motions for the characters, the simulation engineer also needs to create character profiles for a heterogeneous population and link these character traits to appropriate behaviors to be performed at appropriate times and in appropriate places during the simulation. Due to a potentially large number of individuals, the variety of behaviors they may engage in, and the potential complexity of environments, this is currently beyond the scope of military, crowd research, or entertainment simulations. At present, simulations either have a very limited number of character profiles or are meticulously hand scripted. We describe an architecture, called CAROSA (Crowds with Aleatoric, Reactive, Opportunistic, and Scheduled Actions), that facilitates the creation of heterogeneous populations for simulations by using a commercial off-the-shelf software package (Microsoft Outlook®), a Parameterized Action Representation (PAR), and multiple human agent simulation software (HiDAC). We incorporate four different broad action types into CAROSA: scheduled, reactive, opportunistic, and aleatoric. Scheduled activities arise from specified roles for individuals or groups; reactive actions are triggered by contextual events or environmental constraints; opportunistic actions arise from explicit goals and priorities; aleatoric actions are random but structured by choices, distributions, or parametric variations. The CAROSA architecture enables the specification and control of actions for more realistic “human textures” in virtual worlds such as buildings and cities, links human characteristics and high level behaviors to animated graphical depictions, and relieves some of the burden in creating and animating heterogeneous 3D animated human populations