Artificial Life Simulation of Humans and Lower Animals: From Biomechanics to Intelligence

Abstract

The confluence of virtual reality and artificial life, an emerging discipline that spans the computational and biological sciences, has yielded synthetic worlds inhabited by realistic artificial flora and fauna. The latter are complex synthetic organisms with functional, biomechanically simulated bodies, sensors, and brains with locomotion, perception, behavior, learning, and cognition centers. These biomimetic autonomous agents in their realistic virtual worlds foster deeper computationally-oriented insights into natural living systems. Virtual humans and lower animals are of great interest in computer graphics because they are self-animating graphical characters poised to dramatically advance the motion picture and interactive game industries. Furthermore, they engender interesting new applications in computer vision, medical imaging, sensor networks, archaeology, and many other domains.