Virtual Human Toolkit

Virtual Human Toolkit: Open-Source Conversational AI Platform

The Virtual Human Toolkit is an open-source platform for building virtual humans and conversational AI assistants. It provides tools for creating lifelike 3D avatars, animating them, and connecting them to dialogue systems.

What is Virtual Human Toolkit?

The Virtual Human Toolkit (VHTK) is an open-source platform developed by the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies for building and deploying embodied conversational agents, also known as virtual humans. VHTK provides a comprehensive set of tools for creating 3D virtual character models, animating them using procedural animation techniques, and connecting them to dialogue systems to enable natural language conversations.

Some key capabilities and components of VHTK include:

• A graphics engine for rendering realistic 3D virtual human models with support for facial animation, eye movement, and full body motion.
• Tools for authoring procedural animation to automatically generate lip sync, eye blinks, gazing behaviors, gestures, and randomized idle motions.
• Integration with the USC Dialogue Systems to enable text-based or speech-based conversations between real humans and virtual characters.
• Python SDK and REST API for controlling virtual characters programatically in applications.
• Support for AR/VR headsets like HoloLens for embodied mixed reality conversations.
• Active open-source community with over 500 contributors from academia and industry.

The VHTK platform aims to lower the barrier for creating digital human representations and conversational systems by providing an extensive toolset combining state-of-the-art research with ease of use. It has been used across healthcare, education, hospitality, and defense sectors for applications ranging from virtual patients to AI-powered survey interviewers.

Virtual Human Toolkit Features

Official Links