Authoring an Interactive, Functional, Purposeful, Virtual Populace

This paper presents a robust and flexible simulation architecture with an activity authoring system for building complex inhabited interactive virtual environments for military training applications. The presence of an interactive virtual populace adds to the immersion and provides a potentially richer training experience for subjects. Events authored using Parameterized Behavior Trees (PBTs), involving multiple actors in specific roles, enable mission directors to author complex missions requiring a deeper engagement of the populace by defining events which are triggered based on spatial and temporal conditions, or user input. We demonstrate our framework by authoring and simulating a variety of missions including cordon and search, object retrieval, crowd dispersal, and evacuation in a Middle Eastern marketplace environment.