Reusable, Interactive, Multilingual Online Avatars

This paper details a system for delivering reusable, interactive multilingual avatars in online children’s games. The development of these avatars is based on the concept of an intelligent media object that can be repurposed across different productions. The system is both language and character independent, allowing content to be reused in a variety of contexts and locales. In the current implementation, the user is provided with an interactive animated robot character that can be dressed with a range of body parts chosen by the user in real-time. The robot character reacts to each selection of a new part in a different manner, relative to simple narrative constructs that define a number of scripted responses. Once configured, the robot character subsequently appears as a help avatar throughout the rest of the game. At time of writing, the system is currently in beta testing on the My Tiny Planets website to fully assess its effectiveness

ECA Perspectives - Requirements, Applications, Technology

In the last years we have developed a platform for the realization of embodied (conversational) agents, in a distributed logic programming framework. In this paper we will present an overview of our work, by discussing the requirements that acted as our guidelines for design decisions during development, some of the applications that have served as target demonstrators for developing and testing new functionality, and the (distributed logic programming) technology which we used for the realization of the platform and the implementation of our STEP scripting language. Although the focus of our paper will primarily be our own DLP+X3D platform, we believe that our discussion along the perspectives of requirements, applications and technology might be more generally worthwhile in establishing the relative merits of the operational use of ECA-technology. At the end of this paper, we will moreover provide some hints of how to approach the experimental validation of the (possible) benefits of embodied conversational agents in user applications

Authoring Edutainment Stories for Online Players (AESOP): Introducing Gameplay into Interactive Dramas

The video gaming industry has experienced extraordinary technological growth in the recent past, causing a boom in both the quality and revenue of these games. Educational games, on the other hand, have lagged behind this trend, as their creation presents major creative and pedagogical challenges in addition to technological ones. By providing the technological advances of the entertainment genres in a coherent, accessible format to teams of educators, and developing an interactive drama generator, we believe that the full potential of educational games can be realized. Section 1 postulates three goals for reaching that objective: a toolset for interactive drama authoring, ways to insulate authors from game engines, and reusable digital casts to facilitate composability. Sections 2 and 3 present progress on simple versions of those tools and a case study that made use of the resulting toolset to create an interactive drama

Gameplay, Interactive Drama, and Training: Authoring Edutainment Stories for Online Players (AESOP)

This paper describes initial efforts at providing some of the technological advances of the videogame genres in a coherent, accessible format to teams of educators. By providing these capabilities inside an interactive drama generator, we believe that the full potential of educational games may eventually be realized. Sections 1 and 2 postulate three goals for reaching that objective: a toolset for interactive drama authoring, ways to insulate authors from game engines, and reusable digital casts to facilitate composability. Sections 3 and 4 present progress on those tools and an in-depth case study that made use of the resulting toolset to create a large interactive drama. We close with lessons learned to date and a look at the remaining challenges: the unpleasant reality that state-of-the-art tools are not yet able to boost the productivity of edutainment authors

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion

Patterns of Musical Interaction with Computing Devices

In line with the efforts from the Ubiquitous Music Group, our research identified recurring patterns of interaction between humans and computing devices in existing music software and hardware. These four kinds of repeatedly implemented musical interactions are being documented in the form of interaction design patterns, providing an alternative taxonomy of interaction types, suitable for musical and computational developments in ubiquitous music research. In this paper we briefly describe the meaning of patterns in design fields. We also defend the use of interaction patterns in the design of ubiquitous music systems, and present the four proto-patterns proposed in our research. We intend with this paper to foster discussions at this 3rd Ubimus workshop, which can lead to refinement and improvement of the proposed interaction design patterns

Emotion capture based on body postures and movements

In this paper we present a preliminary study for designing interactive systems that are sensible to human emotions based on the body movements. To do so, we first review the literature on the various approaches for defining and characterizing human emotions. After justifying the adopted characterization space for emotions, we then focus on the movement characteristics that must be captured by the system for being able to recognize the human emotions.Comment: 22 page

Jacob - an animated instruction agent for virtual reality

This paper gives an overview of the Jacob project. This project involves the construction of a 3D virtual environment where an animated human -like agent called Jacob gives instruction to the user. The project investigates virtual reality techniques and focuses on three issues: the software engineering aspects of building a virtual reality system, the integration of natural language interaction and other interaction modalities, and the use of agent technology. The Jacob agent complies with the H-Anim standard. It has been given a task model and an instruction model in order to teach the user a particular task. The results of the project can be generalised so that the agent can be used to instruct other tasks in other virtual environments

Gestures Everywhere: A Multimodal Sensor Fusion and Analysis Framework for Pervasive Displays

Gestures Everywhere is a dynamic framework for multimodal sensor fusion, pervasive analytics and gesture recognition. Our framework aggregates the real-time data from approximately 100 sensors that include RFID readers, depth cameras and RGB cameras distributed across 30 interactive displays that are located in key public areas of the MIT Media Lab. Gestures Everywhere fuses the multimodal sensor data using radial basis function particle filters and performs real-time analysis on the aggregated data. This includes key spatio-temporal properties such as presence, location and identity; in addition to higher-level analysis including social clustering and gesture recognition. We describe the algorithms and architecture of our system and discuss the lessons learned from the systems deployment