Blythe, P.W., Miller, G.F., and Todd, P.M. (1996). Human simulation of adaptive behavior: Interactive studies of pursuit, evasion, courtship, fighting, and play. In P. Maes, M.J. Mataric, J.-A. Meyer, J. Pollack, and S.W. Wilson (Eds.), From animals to animats 4: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (pp. 13-22). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Abstract
To understand more about how animate motion is generated and perceived, we need quantitative analyses of motion trajectories from organisms interacting in various important adaptive tasks. Such data is difficult to obtain for most animals, but one species provides a ready source. We have developed software that allows human subjects to generate such motion data by interacting across a computer network in on-screen pursuit and evasion, fighting, courtship, and play. Each subject uses a mouse to control a "bug" that moves in a 2-D environment with another bug controlled by a second remote subject. We have visualized and analyzed the resulting motion data for each task in several ways: 3-D space-time plots of the trajectories themselves, scatterplots of one bug's positions relative to the other, and statistical measures of trajectory parameters including velocity, vorticity, and energy. All of these methods distinguish between the different motion categories. Having human subjects perform these kinds of scenarios can lead to better techniques for analyzing, comparing, and designing the motion capacities of simulated agents.
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