The laboratory for Games and Intelligent Animation (GAIA) focuses on research at the crossroads of animation, artificial intelligence, and psychology in the simulation of virtual humans for games, computer animation, and virtual environments.
A goal of the lab is to create richer, more interesting character behaviors feasibly. For example, current games and virtual worlds permit very little interaction between non-player characters and objects found in the environment. In order to plan actions or even simply select appropriate behaviors, autonomous character need to have an understanding of the objects and how they could be used in various actions. This understanding has been limited to what AI designers can tediously author by hand. We are exploring using available lexical semantic databases, such as WordNet and FrameNet, to provide characters with action and object semantics appropriate for constructing character AIs in games and other virtual world applications.
For more information and recent publications, please visit the GAIA website.