Multi-agent Approach to Designing an Intelligent Virtual Agent for Collaborative Virtual Environments

Increasing interest in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) in different applications has imposed new requirements on the design of IVAs. On the one hand, these requirements include cognitive abilities, and on the other hand social and communication behaviour. The use of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) has been a successful approach to address the variety of evolving abilities needed by an IVA. In this paper, we propose a MAS approach to design an IVA that is able to collaborate with humans in a virtual environment. The proposed model simulates humans by including input, output and processing modules. In addition, the model coordinates the IVA’s verbal and non-verbal communication to convey its internal state while achieving a collaborative task.