How to Create a Virtual Life ?

Virtual Life is a new area dedicated to the simulation of life in virtual worlds, human-virtual interaction and immersion inside virtual worlds. Virtual Life cannot exist without the growing development of Computer Animation techniques and corresponds to the most advanced concepts and techniques of it. In this chapter, we present current research developments in the Virtual Life of autonomous synthetic actors. After a brief description of the perception action principles with a few simple examples, we emphasize the concept of virtual sensors for virtual humans. In particular, we describe in details our experiences in implementing virtual vision, tactile and audition. We then describe perception-based locomotion, a multisensor based method of automatic grasping and vision-based ball games. We also discuss problems of integrating autonomous humans into virtual environments.