Virtual humans made simple

Virtual humans, or intelligent virtual agents, born from the mould of academic, industrial, and science-fiction communities, have been surrounding us for more than a decade. Theoretical knowledge allowing many practitioners and enthusiasts to build their own agents is now available. However, the initial learning curve imposed by this specialized knowledge is quite steep. Even more fundamentally, there is a lack of freely available software assisting in the actual building of these agents. In this chapter, we introduce the Pogamut 3 toolkit. Pogamut 3 is a freeware platform for building the behaviour of virtual humans embodied in a 3D virtual world. It is designed for two purposes: first, to help newcomers to build their first virtual agents; second, to support them as they advance in their understanding of the topic. On the one hand, Pogamut 3 allows for rapid building of simple reactive agents and on the other hand, it facilitates development of challenging agents exploiting advanced artificial intelligence techniques. Pogamut 3 is primarily tailored to the environment of the Unreal Tournament 2004 video game, but it can be connected to other virtual world as well. It is suitable both for research and educational projects.