Serious games became an important device for increasing the awareness of issues that are important to society. One such issue is the environmental impact of driving. To support the training and wide promotion of eco-friendly driving, an appropriate platform and tools are needed. In this paper, we present the Scenario Markup Language (SML), a simple yet expressive language for authoring realistic traffic situations. This effort is part of a novel framework for automatically generating complex scenarios in the transport domain. In particular, SML facilitates the scripting of behavioral driver studies in multi-user online three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds.

We describe CMION, an open source architecture for coordinating the various sensors and effectors of an artificial intelligent agent with its mind, i.e. the high level decision making processes. The architecture was designed to work for virtual graphical agents, including those on mobile devices, as well as robots. Its built-in migration feature allows a character to move between these differing embodiments, inhabiting them in turn. We emphasize the importance of modularity for an architecture supporting migration and highlight design decisions promoting modularity in CMION. An applied example of the architecture's use in a migration situation is given.

Playing with artificial pets is becoming a very popular activity. Artificial pets are present in a variety of forms and interaction styles, from online websites to video game consoles and, more recently, as social robots. However, some of these artificial creatures, in particular robotic pets, are not capable of engaging users for extended periods of time. Issues such as lack of perception capabilities or battery life sometimes break the playful experiences. To increase the attachment between artificial pets and their owners, and create more enjoyable experiences, we propose to extend the identity of a Pleo robot by creating a virtual representation of the robot in a mobile device. The user needs to take care of Pleo, and is able to do so by interacting either with the robot or with the mobile device. In this paper, we describe the work in progress of this system and discuss some future work directions.

Um estudo foi realizado em que um agente artificial foi implementado em duas plataformas, um robo e um telefone celular. Foram realizados videos de interacao entre uma pessoa e o agente nas duas plataformas, que foram apresentados a usuarios, os quais responderam a questoes sobre se os agentes pareciam o mesmo, e justificaram a resposta. As respostas nao foram conclusivas a favor ou contra a identidade entre os agentes apresentados. A partir das justificativas escritas, contudo, mostraremos resultados que sugerem que os usuarios, longe de nao haverem compreendido a performance do agente, colocaram em acao suas capacidades interpretativas e de discernimento sobre o comportamento do agente.

Agents cannot be decoupled from their environment. An agent perceives and acts in a world and the model of the world influences how the agent makes decisions. Most systems with virtual embodied agents simulate the environment within a specific realization engine such as the graphics engine. As a consequence, these agents are bound to a particular kind of environment which compromises their reusability across different applications. We propose the ION Framework, a framework for simulating virtual environments which separates the simulation environment from the realization engine. In doing so, it facilitates the integration and reuse of the several components of the system. The ION Framework was used to create several 3D virtual worlds populated with autonomous embodied agents that were tested with hundreds of users.