Virtual Urban Space Simulator — — Gliwice, Poland City Centre Example in the Context of COVID-19 pandemic

Virtual environments (VE) are commonly used in learning or training in many different areas. We are focused on the problem when a group of artificial agents are simulated at the same time; their behavior is easily recognized as ‘artificial’. To avoid this undesired property presented work was aimed at creating a virtual world with agents equipped with psychosomatic elements that occur in the real world. It has been chosen the implementation of basic needs based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs (MHN), since they are one of necessary elements for the development of simulation of the real world. It is shown that the VE design based on artificial intelligence (AI) planning algorithms and the theory of MHN can be efficiently applied to generate semi-realistic behavior of agents population. Models of coronavirus spread have been introduced into the simulated environment. It allowed to build cases related to the number of infected people and the rate of infection depending on the level of avatar activity associated with basic needs.