Introduction

Welcome to the ICT Virtual Human Toolkit Website.

The ICT Virtual Human Toolkit is a collection of modules, tools, and libraries designed to aid and support users, authors, and developers with the creation of virtual human conversational characters.  The toolkit is an on-going, ever-changing, innovative system fueled by basic research performed at the University of Southern California (USC) Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and its partners. 

Designed for easy mixing and matching with a research project’s proprietary or 3rd-party software, this toolkit provides a widely accepted platform on which new technologies can be built.  It is our hope that, together as a research community, we can further develop and explore virtual human technologies.  The Virtual Human Toolkit can be licensed without cost for academic research purposes. 

Request Virtual Human Toolkit

News

See Release Notes for details.

News Archive

Toolkit Overview

Goal

The goal of the Virtual Human Toolkit created by the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is to make creating virtual humans easier and more accessible, and thus expand the realm of virtual human applications.

What it is

Our research has led to the creation of ground-breaking technologies which we have coupled with other software components to form a complete embodied conversational agent.  All ICT virtual human software is built on top of a common, modular architecture framework which allows toolkit users to do any of the following:

Our technology emphasizes natural language interaction, nonverbal behavior, and visual recognition and is broken up into the following main modules:

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

What it is not

Our on-going, ever-evolving toolkit is not comprised of finished, state-of-the-art technologies. Many of our components are prototypes. Our Components section lists several potential alternatives, should you wish to use them instead. 

The toolkit does not contain all of the basic research technologies currently being developed and utilized at the ICT, such as the reasoning SASO agents.  However, we continually evaluate our basic research findings for potential inclusion in future releases. 

Currently, we are not at liberty to publicly distribute any project-specific data.  However, we encourage all interested parties to contact us directly.

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 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