From Motion to Meaning:  The Near Future of Intelligent Virtual Characters

Speaker: Anica Wilhelm, Meshcapade

We are entering a new era of interactive entertainment in which virtual characters will no longer simply move through our worlds, but will increasingly understand, react, and participate in them. This talk explores the near future of AI-driven characters in games, movies, and immersive experiences. It is rooted in what modern machine learning can already do today and in the building blocks that are emerging right now: body understanding, motion as a carrier of meaning, and character behavior models that turn animation into agency. Rather than a distant sci-fi vision, this is about the concrete steps from today’s tools to tomorrow’s intelligent characters.