Abstract
This project establishes an interactive environment in cyberspace in which users interact with autonomous agents generated from video images of real-world creatures. Each agent has autonomy, personality traits, and behaviors that reflect the results of various interactions, which are determined by an emotional model.
Vision
Our primary goal is to provide users with an entertaining cyberspace environment that is also educational. The system's entertainment value is derived from allowing users to easily construct interactive environments that include many of their favorite creatures as autonomous video agents. Users can create video agents based on their real-world pets and allow the video agents to live in cyberspace forever, even after the real-world pet is gone. The system's educational value stems from the knowledge users gain through interactive experiences.
Another goal of this project is producing a system that facilitates movie or cinema creation. Scenes of animals or humans moving or walking generated by our system will be a powerful tool to produce background scenes including extras in movies.
Finally, another goal of this project is creating an ecosystem in cyberspace for science, education, and relaxation. A cyberspace ecosystem can be based on a real environment; however, our ecosystem is interactive, and each creature that autonomously exists in it has an individual personality. Such a novel approach to interactive ecosystem simulation carefully addresses the fragile balance and tradeoff between the autonomy of the simulated ecosystem and freedom of user interaction. This project will be useful for future computer simulations of natural ecological systems (not only zoological but botanical environments) for science, education, and relaxation.
Today protecting the earth's environment is vital. Therefore, computer simulations of natural ecological systems have an increasingly important role in various fields. Moreover, sophisticated interactive simulation systems need to be established to assess the environment and to enlighten, educate, and expand the range of this research field. In the future, our computer simulation techniques for natural ecological systems will be used in both zoological and botanical environments for science, education, and relaxation purposes.
System Overview
The most important feature of our work is that agents are generated from live video taken from the real world. Our work successfully integrates such diverse technologies as image processing, computer vision, database, artificial intelligence, and post-production. Based on these technologies, a graphical user interface allows users to create content with video agents without making program code. The following are the core technical innovations:
- Image Proccesing: extraction of a target creature in each frame of video sequences , segmentation of the video sequence based on feature values of the extracted target creatures , and establishment of links among video segments.
- Behavior Generation: behavior of each autonomous agent is determined by an emotional model with fuzzy logic , and personality is implemented based on well-known five big factors.
- Video Database: automatic generation/maintenance of a video database and automatic editing of retrieved video segments based on generated behavior.
- User Interface: a graphical tool to create video agents , and an authoring tool to create an interactive cyberspace in which autonomous video agents move.
-> Agents From Reality
->> Other research projects in Osaka University Human Interface Engineering Lab.