Interactive Graphics Design with Situated Agents

Along with sophisticated techniques for natural visualization and rapidly increasing power of modern graphics workstations, high-quality 3D graphics is becoming most attractive for design and simulation. One area in which this new media proves especially useful is architecture and interior design. For example, the visualization of an office room or a building prior to its physical realization could help a designer to obtain realistic impressions of a construction while it is evolving and give free way to imagination at the same time. It is one of the aims that, eventually, a designer is able to explore, and interact with, a manipulable environment without wasting physical matter and with the ability to readily change the immaterial model. In this paper, a scenario for one of the projects in a new research program on “Artificial Intelligence and Computer Graphics” at the University of Bielefeld is described. In the VIENA project (“Virtual Environments and Agents”) we want to provide a way of intelligent communication with a technical system for designing and generating 3D computer graphics1. To do so we apply new AI methods and techniques that build on ideas of situated communication and agents. We think of agents as mediating systems which cooperate with a user by exploiting internal scene information not readily available to the user. For instance, specialized agents can take on particular jobs with respect to geometry or material manipulation. To master communication with the user (designer), the mediating agents are informed about the actual scene as it is seen from the perspective of the user. By moving the camera it is possible to place the designer’s eye in different perspectives. This way, the designer is situated in the developing scene and can issue commands from his or her current perspective. In the following section, we focus on current efforts attempting to bridge the gap between high-quality visualization and interactive systems. We argue that interaction modalities include language and symbols as means of communication. In Section 3, we point out how situated communication could help in interactive graphics design. An important issue is that the system has to know about the spatial structure as it is perceived and experienced by the human user. In Section 4, we sketch various