Men Behaving Appropriately: Integrating the Role Passing Technique into the ALOHA System Brian MacNamee 1 , Simon Dobbyn 2 , Padraig Cunningham 1 , Carol O’Sullivan 2 Artificial Intelligence Group 1 , Image Synthesis Group 2 , Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Republic of Ireland. Email: Simon.Dobbyn@cs.tcd.ie, Brian.MacNamee@cs.tcd.ie, Padraig.Cunningham@cs.tcd.ie, Carol.OSullivan@cs.tcd.ie Abstract The Adaptive Level of Detail for Human Animation (ALOHA) system is a platform for animating virtual humans within a virtual environment using levels-of-detail for geometry, motion and conversational behaviour. Until now the behaviour of these humans has been determined using pre-defined scripts. This paper describes the integration of the intelligent agent based role-passing technique into the ALOHA system to allow for the creation of dynamic scenes. 1. Introduction In the realm of Virtual Environment (VE) research, it is common for research projects to focus on one aspect of a problem, overlooking other important issues as they could distract from the core research being undertaken. Collaboration between research groups focusing on different aspects of the overall VE problem is one means of allowing groups to focus on their own particular research goals, and still pursue the goal of creating fully immersive VEs. In this paper we will discuss how two research projects, one based on level-of-detail (LOD) animation techniques and another based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for computer games, are being combined to create dynamic virtual environments inhabited by intelligent virtual humans. The first research effort, being undertaken by the Image Synthesis Group (ISG), is the Adaptive Level of Detail of Human Animation (ALOHA) system, the aim of which is to animate and render virtual-humans in real-time [8]. The system takes advantage of the limitations of the human visual system to use an LOD approach to compute less accurate models when loss of accuracy is unlikely to be noticed, and more accurate models when a model is likely to be the focus of a viewer’s attention. The second research initiative, part of a larger effort by the Artificial Intelligence Group (AIG) to apply sophisticated AI techniques to the realm of computer games [7], uses intelligent agent technologies to add depth to computer controlled Non Player Characters (NPCs) for adventure and role-playing games [11]. One of the techniques investigated in this research is role-passing which allows an agent in a particular situation to assume a role that then drives the agent’s behaviour for that situation. This paper will describe the integration of the role-passing technique into the ALOHA system.