Digital Life Project: Autonomous 3D Characters with Social Intelligence

Zhongang Cai, Jianping Jiang, Zhongfei Qing, Xinying Guo, Mingyuan Zhang, Zhengyu Lin, Haiyi Mei, Chen Wei, Ruisi Wang, Wanqi Yin, Liang Pan, Xiangyu Fan, Han Du, Peng Gao, Zhitao Yang, Yang Gao, Jiaqi Li, Tianxiang Ren, Yukun Wei, Xiaogang Wang, Chen Change Loy, Lei Yang, Ziwei Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 582-592

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 an extension of DLP enables a virtual character to recognize and appropriately respond to human players' actions.