Spontaneous Avatar Behavior for Human Territoriality

This article presents a new approach for generating believable social behavior in avatars. The focus is on human territorial behaviors during social interactions, such as during conversations and gatherings. Driven by theories on human territoriality, we define a reactive framework that generates avatar group dynamics during social interaction. We model the territorial dynamics of social interactions as a set of social norms that constrain the avatar's reactive motion by running a set of behaviors that blend together. The resulting social group behavior appears relatively robust, but, perhaps more importantly, it starts to bring a new sense of relevance and continuity to virtual bodies that often get left behind when social situations are simulated. We carried out an evaluation of the technology and the result confirms the validity of our approach.