Virtual Soar-Agent Implementations

This chapter provides a brief overview of those virtual agent implementations directly inspired by the cognitive architecture: Soar. This chapter will take a qualitative approach to discussing examples of virtual Soar-agents. Finally, this chapter will speculate on the future of Soar virtual characters. The goals of this chapter are sixfold. The first goal is to explain why cognitive architectures are becoming increasingly important to virtual agent design(s). The second goal is to convey why this chapter focuses exclusively on virtual agents that utilize the Soar architecture. The third goal is to explore some of Soar's technical details. The fourth goal is to showcase a few diverse examples where Soar is beginning to have a design impact on virtual agents. The fifth goal addresses Soar's limitations – when applied to agent design in virtual environments. The final goal speculates on ways Soar can be expanded for virtual agent design(s) in the future.