%hkdylrxudoo$qlpdwlrqqrii9luwxdoo+xpdqv:kdww.lqggrii/dzvvdqgg5xohvv"" $evwudfww

Virtual humans simulations are becoming each time more popular. Nowadays many systems are available to animate virtual humans. Such systems encompass several different domains as: autonomous agents in virtual environments, human factors analysis, training, education, virtual prototyping, simulation-based design, and entertainment. Virtual humans (see Fig.1) are commonly used nowadays in the entertainment industry, and most specifically in movies and video games. If the quality of pictures has been dramatically improved during the last years, the animation is still a major bottleneck in production. For movies, one can afford to spend months in order to produce a realistic animation for each character, but for realtime applications (and this is particularly true in video games) it is still very difficult to handle the behavior of virtual agents, especially when we try to make them autonomous. In Behavioral Animation, virtual humans acquire the capabilities of perceiving their environment and are able to react and make decisions, depending on this input (it is important to note that agents need to be situated in a common environment: otherwise, no interaction is possible). The question that we are facing is: how to populate virtual environments with virtual humans so that they can behave autonomously. Autonomy will be judged as their capabilities to: • react to changes in the environment (including other agents) • reason and make decisions by themselves, based on acquired information or internal stimuli.