"Towards Intelligent Virtual Actors"

Since a few years, the terms of virtual, synthetic or digital actors have been extensively used in order to describe very different kinds of entities. The term “actor” is well-known in the world of cinema and everybody knows it. A Hollywood-like actor is first a human personality. In the context of software, an actor as introduced by Hewitt [1] in 1971 is essentially an object that can send or receive messages. According to Greif and Hewitt [2], actors are defined by their behavior, whatever their shape: a cube that is able to jump by itself and avoid obstacles without intervention of the animator may be also defined as a virtual actor, because it is virtual and because it is able to behave itself.