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The University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) has created a the Virtual Human Toolkit with the goal of reducing some of the complexity inherent in creating virtual humans. Our toolkit is an ever-growing collection of innovative technologies, fueled by basic research performed at the ICT and its partners. The toolkit provides a solid technical foundation and modularity that allows a relatively easy way of mixing and matching toolkit technology with a research project's proprietary or 3rd-party software. Through this toolkit, ICT hopes to provide the virtual humans research community with a widely accepted platform on which new technologies can be built.
What is it
The ICT Virtual Human Toolkit is a collection of modules, tools and libraries that supports the creation of virtual human conversational characters. At the core of the toolkit lies innovative, research-driven technologies which are combined with other software components in order to provide a complete embodied conversational agent. Since all ICT virtual human software is built on top of a common framework, as part of a modular architecture, researchers using the toolkit can do any of the following:*
- utilize the toolkit and all
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- of its components as is;
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- utilize certain components while replacing others with non-toolkit components;
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- utilize certain components in other existing systems.
The technology emphasizes natural language interaction, nonverbal behavior and visual recognition. The main modules are:* [[NPCEditor|Non Player
- Nonplayer Character Editor (NPCEditor)
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- , a package for creating dialogue responses to inputs for one or more characters. It contains a text classifier based on cross-language relevance models that selects a character's response based on the user's text input, as well as an authoring interface to input and relate questions and answers, and a simple dialogue manager to control aspects of output behavior.
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- Nonverbal Behavior Generator (NVBG)
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- , a rule-based behavior planner that generates behaviors by inferring communicative functions from a surface text and selects behaviors to augment and complement the expression of those functions.
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- SmartBody (SB), a character animation platform that provides locomotion, steering, object manipulation, lip syncing, gazing and nonverbal behavior in real time, using the Behavior Markup Language.
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- MultiSense,
- Rapport 1.0,
- Watson, a real-time visual feedback recognition library for interactive interfaces that can recognize head gaze, head gestures, eye gaze and eye gestures using the images of a monocular or stereo camera.
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- AcquireSpeech
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- (Speech Client
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- )
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- , a tool that can send audio to one or more speech recognizers and relay the information to the rest of the system. It also allows text to be typed into the system, simulating speech input. The toolkit uses PocketSphinx as a 3rd party speech recognition solution.
The target platform for the overall toolkit is Microsoft Windows, although some components are multi-platform.
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Although the toolkit supports virtual humans development, some components are prototypes rather than state-of-the-art technologies. The [[Components]] section The Components section lists several potential alternatives for some components.
The toolkit does not contain many of the current basic research technologies at ICT, such as the reasoning [[Projects#SASO| SASO ]] agents. Most of the toolkit technology, however, is the result of basic research, which is continually evaluated for potential use in future releases.
Currently, we are not at liberty to publicly distribute any project-specific data. However, interested parties are encouraged to [[Contact|contact us]] directly. In addition, we are considering creating a forum where users can share their creations.
Who can use it
The toolkit has three two target audiences:*
- Users, who can run any of the modules without any modifications. A simple example character, Brad, is included for everyone to interact with.
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- Developers, who can create their own virtual human characters using the provided software. Authors can modify the provided Brad character, or create their own virtual human completely from scratch.
* Developers, who can either use the provided modules, tools and libraries in their own system or who can extend the components in those cases where they are open source.
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