Annotated worlds for animate characters

Autonomous intelligent agents designed to appear as convincing “animate” characters are presently quite limited. How useful and how believable they are depends on the extent to which they are integrated into a specific environment for a particular set of tasks. This tight integration of character and context is an inadequate approach in the rapidly-expanding realm of large, diverse, structurally homogeneous but disparate virtual environments, of which the Web is only the most obvious example. By separating a character's core features, which are invariable, from its knowledge of and abilities in any specific environment, and embedding this latter information in the environment itself, we can significantly improve the character's believability, its utility, and its reusability across a variety of domains. This thesis describes the requirements for an agent architecture that can interact with an annotated virtual environment, together with languages for representing information in and about these environments. An example applying this approach to intelligent animate characters is presented and used in two substantially different environments, the Web and a multi-user virtual world.