Published in: Proceedings of Web3D 2005: 10th International Conference on 3D Web Technology, ACM Press, New York, April 2005, pp. 75-83.

Virtual humans are being increasingly used in different domains. Virtual human modeling requires to consider aspects belonging to different levels of abstractions. For example, at lower levels, one has to consider aspects concerning the geometric definition of the virtual human model and appearance while, at higher levels, one should be able to define how the virtual human behaves into an environment. H-Anim, the standard for representing humanoids in X3D/VRML worlds, is mainly concerned with low-level modeling aspects. As a result, the developer has to face the problem of defining the virtual human behavior and translating it into lower levels (e.g. geometrical and kinematic aspects). In this paper, we propose VHA (Virtual Human Architecture), a software architecture that allows one to easily manage an interactive HAnim virtual human into X3D/VRML worlds. The proposed solution allows the developer to focus mainly on high-level aspects of the modeling process, such as the definition of the virtual human behavior.