Specification by-example of virtual agents behavior

The development of virtual agents running within graphic environments which emulate real-life contexts may largely benefit from the use of visual specification by-example. To support this specification, the development system must be able to interpret the examples and cast their underlying rules into an internal representation language. This language must find a suitable trade-off among a number of contrasting requirements regarding expressiveness, automatic executability, and suitability to the automatic representation of rules deriving from the analysis of examples. A language is presented which attains this trade-off by combining together an operational and a declarative fragment to separately represent the autonomous execution of each individual agent and its interaction with the environment, respectively. While the declarative part permits to capture interaction rules emerging from specification examples, the operational part supports the automatic execution in the operation of the virtual environment. A system is presented which embeds this language within a visual shell to support a behavioral training in which the animation rules of virtual agents are defined through visual examples.