Individualized Episteme for Multi-Agent Situations in Virtual World
Jong-Hee Park, Jun-Seong Choi · International Journal of Engineering Research and Technology · 2020
Virtual world-based education systems pursue to provide realistic pedagogical experiences in realistic situations.The diversity and realism of situations simulated in the virtual world determines the quality of pedagogical experience in immersed learning.A situation grows more complicated as it involves more agents, who belong to the same multi-agent event or many independent events.Unlike most of the serious games and conventional narrative systems, we indiscriminately model those agents to be autonomous humans regardless of their roles.That is, they have their own beliefs enabling them to behave autonomously and independently from each other.This epistemic differentiation itself provides a major source of additional situation variability compared to the omniscientview or protagonist-centered situations of those conventional narrative systems.Each agent is designed to be incessantly update their respective episteme according to ever-changing background-world conditions to adapt their behavior proactively and reactively.Such episteme cannot be perfect due to incomplete information and partial observation, leading to misconception and epistemic discrepancies, between fact and belief and inter-agent, further deepening the situation variability.With epistemic multiplicity for autonomous and independent agents our simulation method affords the highest diversity and fidelity of pedagogical situations involving multiple agents.We developed a dynamic event-coupling scheme based on schematic functions other than the conventional pre-authored planning.This scheme can not only maximize the situation variability but drastically alleviate the authoring cost along with a real-time animation method compared to monolithically-authored conventional simulation systems.