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 v isual specification by-example, To support this specification, the dev elopment system must be able to interpret the examples and cast their underlying rules into an internal representation language. This langua ge must find a suitable trade-off among a number of contrasting requir ements regarding expressiveness, automatic executability, and suitabil ity to the automatic representation of rules deriving from the analysi s of examples. A language is presented which attains this trade-off by combining together an operational and a declarative fragment to separ ately represent the autonomous execution of each individual agent and its interaction with the environment, respectively. While the declarat ive part permits to capture interaction rules emerging from specificat ion 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 tr aining in which the animation rules of virtual agents are defined thro ugh visual examples.