M. Bubak et al. (Eds.): ICCS 2004, LNCS 3038, pp. 575–582, 2004. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004 Modelling Intelligent Virtual Agent Skills with Human-Like Senses Pilar Herrero and Angélica de Antonio Facultad de Informática. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Campus de Montegancedo S/N. 28.660 Boadilla del Monte. Madrid. Spain {pherrero,angelica}@fi.upm.es Abstract. The research work presented in this paper represents a significant advance, specifically in the area of perception, within the multidisciplinary field of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) and multi-Intelligent Virtual Agent Systems (mIVAS) .Within the cognitive research area there are some studies underwriting that human perception can be understood as a first level of an “awareness model”. Bearing in mind these researches, we have developed a human-like perceptual model based on one of the most successful awareness models in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), called the Spatial Model of Interaction (SMI), which has been applied to Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). This perceptual model extends the key concepts of the SMI introducing some human-like factors typical from human being perception as well as it makes a reinterpretation with the aim of using them as the key concepts of a IVA’s human-like perceptual model. 1 Introduction Nowadays, virtual environments often incorporate human-like embodied virtual agents with varying degrees of intelligence, getting what we call Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs). An IVA may simply evolve in its environment or it may interact with this environment or even communicate with other IVAs or humans, but, in order to make this interaction possible, an IVA has to be aware of its environment. This awareness can be understood as the result of an IVA perceiving its surroundings and therefore those object/agent which are in the environment and nearby to the observer IVA. The research that we present in this paper is precisely oriented towards endowing IVAs with perceptual mechanisms that allow them to be “realistically aware” of their surroundings. We propose a perceptual model, which seeks to introduce more coherence between IVA perception and human being perception. This will increment the psychological “coherence” between the real life and the virtual environment experience. This coherence is especially important in order to simulate realistic situations as, for example, military training, where soldiers must be trained for living and surviving risky situations. A useful training would involve endowing soldier agents with a human-like perceptual model, so that they would react to the same stimuli as a human soldier. Agents lacking this perceptual model could react in a non-