High-level interpretation in virtual environments

As virtual environments applications become more complex, there is a need to interpret user interaction in terms of high-level concepts. In this paper, the relations between conceptual representations of actions and their physical simulation in virtual worlds is investigated. A model inspired fromnatural language processing (NLP) research in the linguistic interpretation of dynamic scenes has been developed. The experiments are based on real-time animation software, which has been enhanced with a symbolic information processing layer, originally developed for NLP-based animation. We report the implementation of a high-level interpretation module that is able to recognize complex actions fromlow-level physical events in the virtual world and discuss its performance as well as directions for further developments.