M.I.T. Media Lab / Synthetic Characters Group does experiments with artificial intelligence. Lead by Bruce Blumberg, who you have seen on TV talking with Alan Alda, and Cynthia Breazeal, who also makes artificially intelligent robots, they set up an environment in the computer, where characters, can learn, from input from the environment.
In this case, the character was projected onto a large glass pane, about four feet square, and through infrared tracking, the character, a mouse, could follow the motion of a large piece of non-digital cheese, that was manipulated by real people passing by.
