Keywords: embodied agents, virtual environments, rich media.
{eliens,huang,jfhoorn,ctv}@cs.vu.nl } \def\altauthor{ % % The command \alignauthor (no curly braces needed) should % precede each author name, affiliation/snail-mail address and % e-mail address. Additionally, tag each line of % affiliation/address with \affaddr, and tag the \alignauthor Anton Eli\"{e}ns, Zhisheng Huang, Johan F. Hoorn and Cees Visser\\ \affaddr{ Intelligent Multimedia Group\\ Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam,\\ Department of Mathematics and Computer Science\\ De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands}\\ \email{{eliens,huang,ctv}@cs.vu.nl} } \date{} \maketitle -->propositions
remarks
programming platform
scripting behavior
multi-user soccer game
dialog
STEP applications
domestic servant
musical conductor
issues:
DLP+X3D
soccer rule
observer
basic actions
composite operators
example
interaction
XSTEP
parallelism>
In contrast with the Personas project, our (dialog) comments are part of a presentation which of itself has a definite narrative structure, in opposition to the 'random' navigation that occurs by browsing 'information spaces'.
The characters and dialog text may be used to enliven the material.
In this way, the students' engagement with the material may be increased Clearly, there is a tension between engagement and immersion.
Immersion, understood as the absorption within a familiar
narrative scheme (in our case the lecturer's presentation),
may be disrupted by the presence of (possibly annoying)
comments, whereas the same comments may lead the attention
back to the material, or
provide a foothold for affective reactions to the material
In one of her talks, Kristina Höök observed that some users get really fed up with the comments delivered by Agneta and Frieda. Nevertheless, it also appeared that annoyance and irritation increased the emotional involvement with the task.
For our presentations, we may ask how embodied agents may help in increasing the emotional involvement of the audience or, phrased differently, how dialogs may lead to emotional enhancement of the material An important difference with the Personas project is that our platform supports the actual merge of dialogs and the humanoid characters that deliver them in a unified presentation format, that is a rich media 3D graphics format based on X3D/VRML.
As a consequence, the tension between immersion and engagement may be partially resolved, since the characters delivering the dialog may be placed in
their 'natural' context, that is a virtual environment.
In
Observation: VR is fiction and fiction is as old as humanity.
This observation which is a different theoretical context
(re)affirmed in
Corollary: subjective feeling of involvement
with fictional situation is achieved by intentional suspension of
disbelief.
The corollary is equally valid for embodied conversational
agents.
In PEFiC
phase 1 -- encoding
phase 2 -- comparison
phase 3 -- response
issues
validation scenario(s)
additional variation by agent-characteristics ...
digital dossier
Create a VR that realizes a digital dossier for a work of a particular artist. A digital dossier represents the information that is available for a particular work of art, or a collection of works, of a particular artist. The digital dossier should be multimedia-enhanced, that is include photographs, audio and other multimedia material in a compelling manner.
Note that dossier is an existing english word,
which according to the
Webster New World Dictionary has the following meaning
In this paper we presented a platform for embodied conversational
agents, by reflecting on the motivations underlying its
development.
We characterized the functionality of the platform
by discussing a selected number of applications,
illustrating its features, and we included a discussion
of its potential limitations.
A brief description of our uniformly logic-based
technology was given and we concluded by
sketching how to validate the platform against
actual user experience.
Nevertheless, despite the relative maturity of the platform,
we see many challenges for its future enhancement
needed for the realization of new target demonstrators.
engagement versus immersion
emotional enhancement
Embodied agents as fictional characters
Empirical support for the PEFiC-model was found
using structured questionnaires with various character
types and focusing on different aspects of the model.
The characters against which the PEFiC-model was tested ranged
from animated Web agents, such as Bonzi Buddy Future research directions
Looking back, we succeeded in creating a platform
for embodied agents that may potentially satisfy propositions 1-5,
uniformly based on (some variant of) logic, suitable
for creating web-based 3D agent applications.
Looking to the future, there is still a lot of work to do.
Technical work, to solve the problems we encountered
with respect to synchronization and parallelism,
as well as work to enhance the support for multimedia.
At this stage it is, however, also important to define
proper evaluation scenarios and to set new challenges
against which to validate the future technological
enhancements of our platform.
validation scenario(s)
case study
It is closely related to the notion of archive, but there
is a different focus:
In relation to the evaluation studies mentioned before,
we must investigate what role embodied agents may play
in presenting such digital dossiers to the user,
and how the agents should appear, that is what services
are offered and what the actual presence of the character
must be.
Conclusions
references