Dynamically simulated characters in virtual environments

Animated characters can play the role of teachers or guides, team mates or competitors, or just provide a source of interesting motion in virtual environments. Characters in a compelling virtual environment must have a variety of complex and interesting behaviors, and be responsive to the user's actions. The difficulty of constructing such synthetic characters currently hinders the development of these environments, particularly when realism is required. The authors present one approach to populating virtual environments-using dynamic simulation to generate the motion of characters. They explore this approach's effectiveness with two virtual environments: the border collie environment, in which the user acts as a border collie to herd robots into a corral, and the Olympic bicycle race environment, in which the user participates in a bicycle race with synthetic competitors.