Situated design of virtual worlds using rational agents

The design and implementation of virtual worlds is separated in time from the use of the virtual world, and therefore is not directly related to an individual's experience of the world. We propose an approach to virtual worlds platforms in which the avatar, a visual representation of a user, has agency. As a rational agent, the avatar can respond to events in the world either through the human control of the avatar or via the avatar's agent. This Kind of agency interacts with the world on the user's behalf and directly in response to the user's activities in the world. We use rational agents to reason about the use and the design of the virtual world. Our agent model is an adaptation of a design agent and includes a design grammar for automatically designing and building a portion of the world.