Development of a computational cognitive architecture for intelligent virtual character

A development of a computational cognitive architecture for the simulation of intelligent virtual characters is described in this paper. By specializing and adapting from an existing structure for a situated design agent, we propose three process models—reflexive, reactive and reflective—which derive behavioural models that underlie intelligent behaviours for these characters. Various combinations of these process models allow intelligent virtual characters to reason in a reflexive, reactive and/or reflective manner according to the retrieval, modification and reconstruction of their memory contents. This paper offers an infrastructure for combining simple reasoning models, found in crowd simulations, and highly deliberative processing models or reasoning, found in ‘heavy’ agents with high-level cognitive abilities. Intelligent virtual characters simulated via this adapted architecture can exhibit system level intelligence across a broad range of relevant tasks. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed architecture, we describe the effect of the reflexive, reactive and reflective processes on a virtual character in our virtual tour application. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.