Collaborative virtual training with physical and communicative autonomous agents. (16th May 2014) - Lopez, Thomas
ABSTRACT Virtual agents are a real asset in collaborative virtual environment for training (CVET) as they can replace missing team members. Collaboration between such agents and users, however, is generally limited. We present here a whole integrated model of CVET focusing on the abstraction of the real or virtual nature of the actor to define a homogenous collaboration model. First, we define a new collaborative model of interaction. This model notably allows to abstract the real or virtual nature of a teammate. Moreover, we propose a new role exchange approach so that actors can swap their roles during training. The model also permits the use of physically based objects and characters animation to increase the realism of the world. Second, we design a new communicative agent model, which aims at improving collaboration with other actors using dialog to coordinate their actions and to share their knowledge. Finally, we evaluated the proposed model to estimate the resulting benefits for the users and we show that this is integrated in existing CVET applications. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.