Designing friends

Embodied Conversational Agents are virtual humans that can interact with humans using verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. In most cases, they have been designed for short interactions. This paper asks the question how one would start to design synthetic characters that can become your friends. We look at insights from social psychology and propose a methodology for designing friends

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Maps, agents and dialogue for exploring a virtual world

In previous years we have been involved in several projects in which users (or visitors) had to find their way in information-rich virtual environments. 'Information-rich' means that the users do not know beforehand what is available in the environment, where to go in the environment to find the information and, moreover, users or visitors do not necessarily know exactly what they are looking for. Information-rich means also that the information may change during time. A second visit to the same environment will require different behavior of the visitor in order for him or her to obtain similar information than was available during a previous visit. In this paper we report about two projects and discuss our attempts to generalize from the different approaches and application domains to obtain a library of methods and tools to design and implement intelligent agents that inhabit virtual environments and where the agents support the navigation of the user/visitor