Towards a unified model of social and environment-directed agent gaze behaviour

Abstract

When considering the gaze behaviours of embodied agents, and necessarily the underlying processes of visual attention that help to guide them, most work to date has been focused either on models aimed at controlling gaze in social situations, for example when one or more ECA's and humans are interacting, or for controlling gaze directed at the environment in a more general sense, typically for helping AVA's accomplish tasks such as navigation. We are designing a model of visual attention that attempts to amalgamate these concepts into a unified design in order to produce intelligent virtual agents that can behave in a social manner with social stimuli while also being attentive to events when mobile in the more general environment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.