Teses

Current Agent Toolkits are too restricting, by preventing their Users to choose the Agent?s Decision Making Process and Testing/Deployment Environment. I propose a flexible Framework capable of integrating Embodied Intelligent Agents with any Virtual Environment. By maintaining a clear and abstract structure of the interaction between the Decision Making Process Centre and the Environment, Framework Users will also be able to choose each Agent?s Decision Making Process. The Agent will always maintain its full feature specification, not mattering what Environment it is. This article describes the proposed Framework?s basic concepts, architecture and several implementation approaches, and presents Use Cases that will prove the soundness of the Framework and its capabilities.

Simulations are of vital importance today. As computers have become more and more powerful, we can make even more complex simulations. Simulators have become more modern and more powerful. Simulators usually have some form of representing the model internally. To build a simulation we need to first construct the model. Models can become extremely complex and to help us with that task we need a tool, which we call an editor. The goal of this work is to create an editor for the ION simulator. The first steps we made were to first define the features we wanted for our editor, were make an analysis on the state of the art of the various editors that exist and analyze how they implemented their features. With the features we want and techniques to implement them we started to build the interface, with the help and input of users. We took an iterative approach in the design of the interface, with multiple usability tests during the development. The end result is a tool that supports all the basic functionality of ION, is very extensible and had a good reception by the users.

In this paper, we expose our experience in designing and developing a simple co-located and cooperative game that uses the Wii Remote for character control. According to a recent study, there is an entire demographic of potential players that favours this type of game and does not currently play due to lack of offerings. We begin by exposing related work ? Gameplay Chalenges; Game Design Patterns; Group Task Theories (from the field of Social Psychology); Analysis of cooperative games; The Wii, it's controller and software for using it on a PC. We continue by exploring the potential for cooperation of each of the Group Task types and formalizing several game mechanics we encountered while doing our game analysis. We then proceed to examine our experience in designing and developing Geometry Friends. From a design perspective, we carefully used some of the Design Patterns and Gameplay Challenges that were supportive of cooperative gameplay. While, from a technological development perspective we used several technological solutions that allowed us to create the game we set out to create. These were ? a game engine (XNA), a physics engine (Farseer) and an API that allowed interfacing with the Wii Remote (WiimoteLib). Several user tests were made during the development of the game so that we could ascertain if the game was fun, cooperative and if the controls were adequate. Overall, the results of the evaluation were positive.

Humans interact with computer systems and other humans in similar ways. Researchers identified personality as an important requirement for believable synthetic agents. By modeling a personality system in the agent's architecture we can bring the illusion of life to users and suspend their disbelief. Personality in synthetic agents is the main subject of this dissertation. Our focus is on group dynamics of agents interacting with users as a team with the same cooperative task. Instead of focusing on efficiency and performance we are more concerned on credibility and believability. We extended an existing model for building believable synthetic agents (SGD Model) by improving its personality system. One of the concluding remarks from previous experimental results of the original model states that very cohesive groups induce lower levels of user identification with the group. So we decided to add individualism as a new feature of the SGD Model by having a new type of incitement. The new individual motivation is permanently in conflict with the revised existing (group) motivation: help the group or do something for its own profit? Our improved personality system dictates if an agent would rather choose the former or the latter. The model was tested in a computer game. Our evaluation shows that the extended version of the SGD Model and its implementation are working as intended. Agents? behaviors and reactions follow a well defined set of rules. Additional tests are needed to verify if the extended model offers a more believable environment of cooperative synthetic agents.