Lessons Learned from Virtual Humans

Abstract

Over the past decade, we have been engaged in an extensive research effort to build virtual humans and applications that use them.  Building a virtual human might be considered the quintessential AI problem, because it brings together many of the key features, such as autonomy, natural communication, sophisticated reasoning and behavior, that distinguish AI systems.  This paper describes major virtual human systems we have built and important lessons we have learned along the way.