Direct Manipulation Like Tools for Designing Intelligent Virtual Agents

If intelligent virtual agents are to become widely adopted it is vital that they can be designed using the user friendly graphical tools that are used in other areas of graphics. However, extending this sort of tool to autonomous, interactive behaviour, an area with more in common with artificial intelligence, is not trivial. This paper discusses the issues involved in creating user-friendly design tools for IVAs and proposes an extension of the direct manipulation methodology to IVAs. It also presents an initial implementation of this methodology. As computer graphics techniques progress from research result to wide popular adoption, a key step is the development of easy-to-use tools. A well known example in the last decade has been the development of HTML handling tools from simple text editors to graphical tools. These tools radically change the way in which graphical content is produced. They remove the need for programming ability and the concern with syntactic detail that is req...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IVA
• Authors: Marco Gillies, Dale Robeterson, Daniel Ballin
• Keywords: IVA 2005