Emotion is an important aspect of human intelligence and has been shown to play a significant role in the human decision-making process. This paper proposes a comprehensive computational model of emotions that can be incorporated into the physiological and social components of the emotions. Since interaction between characters can have a major impact on emotional dynamics, the model presents a social learning component for learning associations among characters, which in turn affects the character’s decision-making and social interactions. The model also designs a set of personality progression functions to enhance individual differences. In addition, we demonstrate this empirically through a computer simulation of a dynamic environment inhabited by a few characters to test our emotional model. The experiments show the effectiveness of our emotional model to build believable characters during interaction with the virtual environment.

This paper deals with the implications of showing the storyteller’s perspective when telling stories in virtual environments. The paper proposes an open and reusable architecture for the construction of virtual guides who tell stories about the worlds they inhabit from their own perspective. The system consists of two main components: the structure of a knowledge base to code the narrative knowledge about the worlds and a novel hybrid algorithm for the generation of narratives showing the storyteller’s viewpoint. The complete architecture has been developed. Furthermore, we carried out a study with users in order to both validate the implemented storytelling system and test whether the users consider it significantly better or worse (in terms of several aspects related to believability) adding the virtual guide perspective (as both text and animations showing emotions) to the guide discourse. The interesting results are discussed.

The simulation of synthetic humans inhabiting virtual environments is a current research topic with a great number of behavioral problems to be tackled. Semantical virtual environments (SVEs) have recently been proposed not only to ease world modeling but also to enhance the agent–object and agent–agent interaction. Thus, we propose the use of ontologies to define the world’s knowledge base and to introduce semantic levels of detail that help the sensorization of complex scenes—containing lots of interactive objects. The object taxonomy also helps to create general and reusable operativity for autonomous characters—for example, liquids can be poured from containers such as bottles. On the other hand, we use the ontology to define social relations among agents within an artificial society. These relations must be taken into account in order to display socially acceptable decisions. Therefore, we have implemented a market-based social model that reaches coordination and sociability by means of task exchanges. This paper presents a multi-agent framework oriented to simulate socially intelligent characters in SVEs. The framework has been successfully tested in three-dimensional (3D) dynamic scenarios while simulating a virtual university bar, where groups of waiters and customers interact with both the objects in the scene and the other virtual agents, finally displaying complex social behaviors.

This paper holds the material presented at our keynote at the Intelligent Virtual Environments and Virtual Agents Conference, where we analyzed future trends in virtual agent and environment technologies, as applied to the fields of videogames and interactive multimedia. We begin by observing current tendencies in game development projects, both in the market and in the academia, outlining their respective strengths and weaknesses. We follow by describing the aspects of game development that will come to shape the next generation of games, and discuss the requirements for academic projects to achieve the level of quality required to be competitive in this field. In the rest of the paper we analyze the roles, importance, challenges, and research opportunities that a new generation of virtual characters and environments will bring to the world of interactive entertainment.

We have developed two different art applications as a way of guiding and testing of our technical work in crowd simulation and interface devices. In this paper, we describe both of them as well as the systems used to implement them. ‘Crowds’ is an immersive art installation with stereo projection based on our development of the specification of crowd behavior using XML and images, a proprietary tangible wind interface, and interactive real-time navigation. ‘UnderCrowds’ deals with large crowds, implemented in the graphics processor, and uses a crowd sensor to make the size of the virtual crowd proportional to the number of spectators crossing in front of the said sensor.