MARINA DEL REY, Calif. -- The University of Southern California is working to make true artificial intelligence, KNBC's Patrick Healy reported.

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USC's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) partners with Hollywood and the gaming community to create interactive and virtual environments.

The institute can create avatars, virtual people, to interact with users. The system uses six cameras to measure visual cues from humans.

ICT, established in 1999, gets most of its funding from the U.S. Army to develop immersive training for soldiers.

Clinical psychologist Skip Rizzo said the project has nonmilitary projects as well. He said interacting with a virtual patient can help train therapists.

"Advances in artificial intelligence are going to reshape the world," Rizzo said. "I think the virtual patient project is going to revolutionize how we do training in clinical fields."

Research scientist Patrick Kenny said that beginning with voice recognition software, each exchange with virtual avatars entails a series of digital analyses to determine response and demeanor.

"That gets sent over to the animation system and played out," Kenny said. "Just grow these characters to be more interesting, entertaining, more human."

One of ICT's current projects is Sgt. Star, the Army's virtual recruiter. Project Director Diane Piepol said Sgt. Star's image is projected onto a semi-transparent screen. Piepol emphasized appearance is only one facet of the cyber-evolution of the virtual humans she and her colleagues expect to become commonplace, perhaps within a decade.

"We will have characters that we feel we have relationships with. Whether we meet them in training, education, museum, or Web site, those relationships will be part of our daily lives," Piepol said.

The institute's other projects include a program for treating veterans with post-traumatic stress syndrome, using virtual reality simulation to return them to the combat zone.

More Resources:

• USC's Institute for Creative Technologies