A new integration method of constructing an interactive virtual environment for the collaboration between virtual agent and real human

A new collaborative environment has been constructed recently, in which a human-shaped virtual agent can communicate with a real human through both verbal and nonverbal ways. The collaborative environment is very promising as the next generation communication environment, but the workload involved in constructing the system is too large for the practical use. In this study, the system for simulating the collaborative environment is divided into several subsystems according to its function, and for each subsystem a new construction method to reduce the construction workload has been developed individually. In this paper, newly developed construction methods are described such as an object-oriented method for constructing virtual spaces, an affordance-based body motion synthesizing method and a modeling method of the virtual agent's behavior using Petri net.