Introduction

Welcome to the ICT Virtual Human Toolkit Website.

The ICT Virtual Human Toolkit is a collection of modules, tools and libraries that allow users, authors and developers to create their own virtual humans. This software is being developed at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies and can be licensed without cost for academic research purposes.

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Toolkit Overview

Goal

The University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) has created 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:

The technology emphasizes natural language interaction, nonverbal behavior and visual recognition. The main modules are:

The target platform for the overall toolkit is Microsoft Windows, although some components are multi-platform.

What is it not

Although the toolkit supports virtual humans development, some components are prototypes rather than state-of-the-art technologies. 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 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 us directly. In addition, we are considering creating a forum where users can share their creations.

Who can use it

The toolkit has two target audiences:

All toolkit software can be used without cost for academic research purposes provided all associated licenses are being honored. If you are using the toolkit or any of its components for published research, please cite us appropriately, as per clause 3 of the license. See the Links & Papers section for more details. Please contact us if you are interested in a commercial license.

Where To Get It

Please see the Support section for instructions on how to obtain the ICT Virtual Human Toolkit. The Getting Started section below will guide you through the first steps of using the software.

License and Disclaimers

The complete License Agreement and supporting documentation can be read in the License section. The License Agreement states, but is not limited to:

Please contact us if you are interested in a commercial license.

Please be aware that the toolkit consists of research software for which documentation and support is limited. However, both the software as well as the accompanying documentation are actively being developed and updated.

Current Toolkit Users

There are many [[Projects|ICT projects]] that use a subset of the technology provided with the toolkit. Below is a list of some examples:
* [[Projects#SASO|SASO]]
* [[Projects#Virtual Patient|Virtual Patient]]
* [[Projects#Sergeant Star|Sergeant Star]]
* [[Projects#Gunslinger|Gunslinger]]
* Elect BiLat
* [http://www.mos.org/interfaces/ InterFaces Project] (with Boston Museum of Science)
* Tactical Questioning

In addition, many groups outside of ICT use some of the toolkit components, most notably [[SmartBody]] and [[Watson]]:
* University of Reykjavik
* German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
* ArticuLab at Northwestern University
* Telecom Paris Tech
* Affective Computing Research group at MIT Media Lab
* ICSI/UCB Vision Group at UC Berkeley
* Human-Centered, Intelligent, Human-Computer Interaction group at Imperial College
* Worcester Polytechnic Institute
* Microsoft Research
* Relational Agents group at Northeastern University
* Component Analysis Lab at Carnegie Mellon University

Documentation Overview

Please go to the Download & Support page for instructions on how to obtain the toolkit. This page will also give you further guidance on how to install and run the provided scenario.

For navigation on this website, please use the menu on the left. Each of the listed sections is described below: