Sometime back I have attended Nasscom NTLF and attended a session where learnt about autonomous virtual human as a part of AGI roadmap as once of the interesting use case. Imagine a world where virtual characters behave and interact almost like real people. This is the exciting realm of autonomous virtual humans (AVHs), a sophisticated form of artificial intelligence (AI) that breathes life into digital environments.
What are Autonomous Virtual Humans?
AVHs are essentially software agents with a virtual body, often resembling a human form. They operate within programmed constraints but can act independently. Their core functionalities involve:
Behavior Authoring: AVHs are programmed with specific objectives and a range of behaviors. This includes defining their current state, potential actions, and goals they strive to achieve. Complexities like collaboration or competition with other virtual entities are factored in to mimic real-world scenarios.
Movement and Navigation: They utilize computational models to navigate virtual environments, incorporating human-like nuances such as side-stepping and careful foot placement.
Perception and Awareness: These virtual beings possess a form of perception, understanding their surroundings through a simulated field representation. This allows them to avoid collisions and interact with objects and other agents in real-time.
Machine Learning: Some AVHs leverage machine learning to autonomously learn navigation and movement strategies. This enables them to adapt to new situations and refine their interactions over time.
Personality Integration: AVHs can exhibit personality traits that influence their movements and decision-making, creating a more personalized and engaging experience.
The Power of Immersion: Applications of AVHs
The potential applications of AVHs are vast and transformative across various fields:
Cinematic Content Creation: AVHs can populate movie scenes with background characters that move and interact realistically, saving time and resources on individual animation.
Interactive Entertainment: In video games and virtual reality (VR), these virtual beings can act as non-player characters (NPCs) with their own stories and behaviors, enriching the gaming experience.
Urban Planning: Simulating pedestrian traffic and crowd dynamics with AVHs helps urban planners design public spaces with better flow and safety considerations.
Training and Simulations: AVHs can portray civilians or patients in training simulations for military, medical, or disaster response personnel, providing realistic scenarios to hone their skills.
Security Simulations: Modeling crowd behavior in emergency situations using AVHs allows security forces to plan and train for crowd control and evacuation procedures.
Virtual Tour Guides: In VR applications, AVHs can serve as guides, leading users through virtual museums or historical sites, enhancing the educational value of the experience.
These examples showcase how AVHs can elevate realism, provide scalable solutions, and foster dynamic interactions in virtual environments. They are particularly valuable when human-like interaction is crucial but impractical with real people.
AI advancements like AGI hold immense potential for AVHs. AGI's ability to learn and adapt could enable AVHs to develop more nuanced behaviors, make real-time decisions, and even possess emotions. Imagine AVHs in training simulations that respond realistically to trainee choices, or virtual tutors who personalize their teaching based on a student's emotional state. AGI could revolutionize AVHs, creating truly lifelike and interactive experiences.
Developing realistic AVHs is not easy. Here are some key challenges as of now:
Scalable Architecture: Designing a scalable architecture that integrates complex systems for detailed modeling and animation of virtual humans is crucial.
Realistic Appearance: Achieving a believable appearance for interactive manipulation requires intricate modeling of anatomy, skin, and facial expressions. This includes creating realistic deformable bodies and clothing.
Behavioral Realism: Animating AVHs with minimal sensors while maintaining lifelike behaviors is a challenge. This involves creating nuanced and context-aware behaviors that can adapt to environmental changes.
Perception and Decision-Making: Developing a realistic perception system and a decision-making module that allows AVHs to react and make choices in real-time is complex.
Motion Control: A hierarchical motion control system is needed to model individual behaviors like locomotion, gestures, and interactions with objects and other virtual humans.
Networking Requirements: Minimizing network bandwidth required for exchanging complex AVH information is essential, especially for online and multiplayer environments.
Emotion and Personality: Creating believable relationships between real users and AVHs based on emotions and personalities requires sophisticated modeling of these aspects.
Group Behaviors: Simulating realistic and believable behaviors of groups and crowds involves complex algorithms that can handle the dynamics of multiple agents interacting with each other.
These challenges highlight the interdisciplinary nature of creating AVHs, requiring expertise in computer graphics, AI, cognitive science, and more. The ultimate goal is to create virtual beings that are not only visually convincing but also capable of intelligent and autonomous action within their environments.