Virtual Agent Societies with the mVITAL Intelligent Agent System

Intelligent multi-agent systems are currently used for a variety of purposes, both in research and for real-world applications. One of their most interesting, yet not fully explored uses, is as frameworks to support computerbased simulations of virtual worlds inhabited by life-like entities, that is, intelligent virtual environments, for purposes of education, demonstration and entertainment. This paper is a presentation of mVITAL, an intelligent multiagent system aiming to serve most of the fields such systems are today used in, while being fully capable of supporting intelligent virtual environment applications, where issues such as sophisticated virtual reality representation, advanced reasoning, as well as user embodiment, intervention and interaction, are crucial. To justify this, a fully operational example of such an application, namely, the Vital Playground, is also presented.