Abstract

Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) are interactive characters controlled by software agents that exhibit human-like qualities. When interacting with human participants in virtual communities, an IVA is expected to be intelli-gent, as well as believable. A major factor that determines the intelligence and believability of an IVA is its ability to be aware of its physical and social environments. An important aspect of physical environment awareness is the ability of an agent to refer at an abstract level to the interactions of entities (avatars and objects) in its surrounding environment. However, sensor data received from many virtual worlds describe the agent’s environment at the level of objects and avatars. This has introduced an information representation gap between virtual worlds and IVAs implemented using agent systems such as those based on the BDI architecture. In this thesis, the dynamic virtual environment of an IVA is described using