Affordances Implemented by Fuzzy Cognitive Maps for

Affordances Implemented by Fuzzy Cognitive Maps
for Believable Agents
Virtual Helmsman Prototyping by Sailing Affordances
Marc Parenthoën*, Theirry Morineau**, Jacques Tisseau*
* Laboratoire d’Informatique Industrielle (Li2 , EA 2215 UBO/ENIB)
ENIB - Parvis Blaise Pascal - 29280 Plouzané - BP 30815 - F-29608 Brest Cedex FRANCE
Phone : +33 (0)298 05 66 31
Fax : +33 (0)298 05 66 29
Web : http://www.enib.fr/chercher/LI2
{parenthoen, tisseau}@enib.fr
** PERCOTEC (CNRS-LAMIH, Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut-Cambrésis)
Le Mont Houy - 59313 Valenciennes Cédex
Phone: +33 (0)327 51 14 32
Fax : +33 (0)327 51 13 16
Web : http://www.univ-valenciennes.fr/LAMIH/Percotec/percotec.html
[email protected]
Topics : Virtual Worlds, Virtual Storry Telling, Virtual Sailing
Keywords : Affordances, Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, Believable Agents, Virtual Helsman.
Abstract
This article lies within the interactive virtual stories telling scope and proposes the use
of fuzzy cognitive maps as a tool to model emotional behavior of virtual actors improvising
in free interaction. We show how fuzzy cognitive maps can be delocalized on each agent
level to model autonomous agents within a virtual world. Then, within the framework of
the realization of a virtual sailing ship intended for the sporting drive, we create a virtual
helsman. The virtual environment must be ecologically valid in order to be intuitively
explored and used. Researches in ecological psychology show that individuals base their
behaviours on affordances. They are directly perceived without cognitive effort and drive
the modalities of action. We proposes the use of the fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) as
a tool to modelize the affordances. We implemented FCMs and we use them to extract
the affordances automatically from the sailor environment. We validate the virtual helsman thus prototyped by measuring his capacities of imitation, according to whether he
uses these affordances or not, compared to a real helmsman. We show thus that FCMs
are particularly well adapted to the modeling of the affordances and can contribute to
characterize believable agents roles.
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