TASK-LEVEL INTERACTION WITH VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS AND VIRTUAL ACTORS

In many virtual environment (VE) applications, the VE system must be a ble to display accurate models of human figures that can perform routi ne behaviors and adapt to events in the virtual world. In order to ach ieve such adaptive, task-level interaction with virtual actors, it is necessary to model elementary human motor skills. SkillBuilder is a so ftware system for constructing a set of motor behaviors for a virtual actor by designing motor programs for arbitrarily complicated skills. Motor programs are modeled using finite state machines, and a set of s tate machine transition and ending conditions for modeling motor skill s has been developed. Using inverse kinematics and automatic collision avoidance, SkillBuilder was used to construct a suite of behaviors fo r simulating visually guided reaching, grasping, and head-eye tracking motions for a kinematically simulated actor consisting of articulated , rigid body parts. All of these actions have been successfully demons trated in real time by permitting the user to interact with the virtua l environment using a whole-hand input device.