Reactive Virtual Creatures for Dexterous Physical Interactions

Dexterous physical interactions with virtual creatures are important to bring the fun of playing with animals into arts and entertainment. For reality of interaction, virtual creatures need to react to highly varied user inputs in a variety of ways according to physical and psychological laws. We propose constructing virtual creatures using a physical simulator, sensor/attention models, and physical motion controllers. The physical simulator and motion controllers generate highly varied physically real reactions, while sensor/attention models provide psychologically feasible target selection for motion controllers. Having constructed a virtual creature prototype, we realize communicative physical interactions such as guessing and attracting attention by touching it via a haptic device. We have confirmed the prototype’s effectiveness experimentally.