Department of Computer Science
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa 52242
cremer@cs.uiowa.edu, (319) 335-0736 phone, (319) 335-3624 fax
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~cremer/
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~kearney/scenario
J. Cremer, J. Kearney, Y. Papelis, and R. Romano, "The Software Architecture for Scenario Control in the Iowa Driving Simulator," Proceedings of the 4th Computer Generated Forces and Behavioral Representation Conference, May 4-6, 1994, Orlando, FL.
J. Cremer and J. Kearney, "Scenario Authoring For Virtual Environments," Proceedings of IMAGE VI Conference, July 1994, Tucson, AZ.
Virtual environments present what appear to be conflicting demands on scenario control. On one hand, computer generated agents must behave in consistent and believable ways in a complex, dynamic environment. They must interact with other simulated agents and subjects who have considerable freedom of action. On the other hand, experimental and training applications require that subjects be tested under controlled conditions. The essential aspects of events and situations must be repeated from trial to trial. The challenge we face is to create scenarios that reproduce the intended conditions without overly restricting the subject's actions and while maintaining dynamism, complexity, and spontaneity in agent behaviors.
For example, consider the problem of creating a crash threat on a simulated urban freeway for a virtual driving environment. Such a scenario might be part of an experiment to determine the influence of Alzheimer's disease on the driving ability. The scenario requires generation of dense traffic that provides a backdrop for a critical situation such as an abrupt stop or dangerous lane change. In order to compare the performance of subjects, the behavior of the vehicles surrounding the driver must be carefully orchestrated -- some vehicle, possibly determined on-line, must perform the threatening deed and gaps in the traffic that provide possible escape routes must be consistently presented. Moreover, this coordination must be done inconspicuously so as not to alert subjects to the upcoming event.
Research in this area encompasses technology for:
Rodney A. Brooks, "A Robot that Walks: Emergent Behaviors from a Carefully Evolved Network," Proceedings of the 1989 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May, 1989.
J. Granieri, W. Becket, B. Reich, J. Crabtree, and N. Badler, "Behavioral control for real-time simulated human agents," Proceedings of the 1995 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, Monterey, CA, 1995
David Harel, Hagi Lachover, Amnon Naamad, Amir Pnueli, Michl Politi, Rivi Sherman, Aharon Shtull-trauring, and Mark Trakhtenbrot, "Statemate: A working environment for development of complex reactive systems", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v. 16, n. 4, April, 1990.
Margaret Kelso and Peter Weyhrauch and Joseph Bates, "Dramatic Presence", PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, v. 2, n. 1, 1993.
P. Maes, Designing Autonomous Agents, The MIT Press, 1990
M. Tambe, W. L. Johnson, R. Jones, F. Koss, J. Laird, P. Rosenbloom, and K. Schwamb, "Intelligent agents for interactive simulation environments", AI Magazine, v. 16, n. 1, 1995.
Recent workshops related to behavior modeling and interaction in virtual environments include:
From Animals to Animats 3, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, edited by Dave Cliff, Philip Husbands, Jean-Arcady Meyer, and Stewart W. Wilson August 8-12, 1994, Brighton, England.
AAAI 1995 Spring Symposium on Interactive Story Systems: Plot and Character, Stanford, CA, March 1995.
The First Workshop on Simulation and Interaction in Virtual Environments, Iowa City, Iowa, July, 1995.
Usability and User-Centered Design
Collaboration with researchers in the area of Usability and User-Center Design to improve scene and scenario authoring interfaces. A second area of potential collaboration is the development of interfaces for interactive testing and inspection of complex environments densely populated with automonous agents. Related to this is experimenter-in-the-loop simulation in which human directors guide the evolution of the scenario by sending on-line instructions to simulated agents.