Digital Life Project: Autonomous 3D Characters with Social Intelligence
This work addresses the challenge of simulating realistic social interactions and embodied behaviors in digital environments, which is incremental as it combines existing techniques like motion matching with novel components for social modeling.
The Digital Life Project tackles the problem of creating autonomous 3D characters with social intelligence by developing a framework that integrates language-driven socio-psychological modeling and text-driven motion synthesis, resulting in state-of-the-art performance in both domains and enabling characters to autonomously engage in dialogues and perform contextually relevant movements.
In this work, we present Digital Life Project, a framework utilizing language as the universal medium to build autonomous 3D characters, who are capable of engaging in social interactions and expressing with articulated body motions, thereby simulating life in a digital environment. Our framework comprises two primary components: 1) SocioMind: a meticulously crafted digital brain that models personalities with systematic few-shot exemplars, incorporates a reflection process based on psychology principles, and emulates autonomy by initiating dialogue topics; 2) MoMat-MoGen: a text-driven motion synthesis paradigm for controlling the character's digital body. It integrates motion matching, a proven industry technique to ensure motion quality, with cutting-edge advancements in motion generation for diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that each module achieves state-of-the-art performance in its respective domain. Collectively, they enable virtual characters to initiate and sustain dialogues autonomously, while evolving their socio-psychological states. Concurrently, these characters can perform contextually relevant bodily movements. Additionally, a motion captioning module further allows the virtual character to recognize and appropriately respond to human players' actions. Homepage: https://digital-life-project.com/