Research into virtual environments on the one hand and artificial intelligence and artificial life
on the other has largely been carried out by two different groups of people with different preoccupations
and interests, but some convergence is now apparent between the two fields. Applications
in which activity independent of the user takes place — involving crowds or other agents — are
Beginning to be tackled, while synthetic agents, virtual humans and computer pets are all areas in
which techniques from the two fields require strong integration. The two communities have much
to learn from each other if wheels are not to be reinvented on both sides. This paper reviews
the issues arising from combining artificial intelligence and artificial life techniques with those
of virtual environments to produce just such intelligent virtual environments. The discussion is
illustrated with examples that include environments providing knowledge to direct or assist the
user rather than relying entirely on the user’s knowledge and skills, those in which the user is
represented by a partially autonomous avatar, those containing intelligent agents separate from
the user, and many others from both sides of the area. world. Some see distributed interactive virtual environments such as Active Worlds as a basis for
the development of such virtual worlds, providing an on-line laboratory for the investigation of AL
and of long-term autonomous interaction between AL forms and virtual worlds. Where much work
in genetic algorithms stays at the level of genotype, a virtual world would allow the exploration of
the phenotype consequences of a particular genetic data set and the exploration of evolution at the
phenotype level in the same sort of way as occurs in the real world.
