Smart Events and Primed Agents

We describe a new organization for virtual human responses to dynamically occurring events. In our approach behavioral responses are enumerated in the representation of the event itself. These Smart Events inform an agent of plausible actions to undertake. We additionally introduce the notion of agent priming, which is based on psychological concepts and further restricts and simplifies action choice. Priming facilitates multi-dimensional agents and in combination with Smart Events results in reasonable, contextual action selection without requiring complex reasoning engines or decision trees. This scheme burdens events with possible behavioral outcomes, reducing agent computation to evaluation of a case expression and (possibly) a probabilistic choice. We demonstrate this approach in a small group scenario of agents reacting to a fire emergency.

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