Simulation and scenario support for virtual environments

Over the past few years, we have developed several research projects focusing on critical support technologies for virtual environments. In this paper, we outline three aspects of our effort: simulation support, scenario authoring, and real-time animation of human locomotion. Our work on physical simulation combines dynamics and collision/contact analysis to provide physical realism to virtual environments. Our work on scenario authoring supports both modeling reactive semiautonomous behavior of complex entities, and orchestration of groups of such entities to satisfy the goals or intentions of an experimenter/author. This effort evolved from research on the Iowa Driving Simulator, a large-scale virtual driving environment. Our work on real-time animation of human locomotion concentrates on methods to generate realistic human walking motions from simple positional control parameters. Locomotion can be along an arbitrary curved path. The resulting animation switches among five walking modes—walking, running, lateral stepping, backward stepping, or turning around—based on the current velocity and heading. We present demonstrations of our work in the three areas and outline the directions of future research.