Virtual Human Toolkit

Welcome

The ICT Virtual Human Toolkit is a collection of modules, tools, and libraries designed to aid and support researchers and developers with the creation of virtual human conversational characters. The Toolkit is an on-going, ever-changing, innovative system fueled by basic research performed at the University of Southern California (USC) Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and its partners.

Designed for easy mixing and matching with a research project’s proprietary or 3rd-party software, the Toolkit provides a widely accepted platform on which new technologies can be built. It is our hope that, together as a research community, we can further develop and explore virtual human research and technologies.

News

Aug 23 2022 - The VHToolkit is now compatible with both Windows 10 and 11, and Unity has been updated to version 2022.1.

Jan 14 2020 - The latest version of the VHToolkit upgrades Unity to 2019.2. See the Release Notes for details.

Nov 17 2018 - We have updated Unity to 2018.2 and fixed the speech recognition example.

See Release Notes and News Archive for details.

Modules

The ICT Virtual Human Toolkit is built upon a common modular architecture which enables users to utilize all modules as is, one or more modules coupled with proprietary components, or one or more modules in other existing systems. Our technology emphasizes natural language interaction, nonverbal behavior and perception. Its main modules are listed below. See Documentation for an overview of the architecture, the messaging API, and other components.

MultiSense is a multimodal sensing framework which is created as a platform to integrate and fuse sensor technologies and develop probabilistic models for human behavior recognition. MultiSense tracks and analyzes users’ facial expressions, body posture, acoustic features, linguistic patterns and higher-level behavior descriptors (e.g. attention, fidgeting). It uses the Perception Markup Language (PML).
At the core of the NPCEditor is a statistical text classification algorithm that selects the character’s responses based on the user’s utterances. A character designer specifies a set of responses and a set of sample utterances that should produce each response through a provided authoring tool. The NPCEditor also contains a dialogue manager that specifies how to use the classifier results.
The NVBG is a rule-based system that analyzes character text and functional markup to propose nonverbal behaviors. The resulting schedule is Behavior Markup Language (BML).
SmartBody is a character animation library that provides synchronized locomotion, steering, object manipulation, lip syncing, gazing and nonverbal behavior in real-time. It uses Behavior Markup Language (BML) to transforms behavior descriptions into real-time animations.
The Toolkit uses Unity as its main game engine, which has been extended to include a tight integration with SmartBody, a messaging protocol, debug and authoring tools, and a graphical timeline editor for creating cut-scenes.