Simulating virtual humans in networked virtual environments

In the past decade, networked virtual environments (NVEs) have been an incr easingly active area of research, with the first commercial systems emergin g recently. Graphical and behavioral representation of users within such sy stems is a particularly important issue that has lagged in development behi nd other issues such as network architectures and space structuring. In thi s paper, we expose the importance of using virtual humans within these syst ems and provide a brief overview of several virtual humans technologies use d in particular for simulation of crowds. As the main technical contributio n, the paper presents the integration of these technologies with the COVEN- DIVE platform, the extension of the DIVE system developed within the COVEN project. In conjunction with this, we present our contributions through the COVEN project to the MPEG-4 standard concerning the representation of virt ual humans.