The F@ Framework of Designing Awareness Mechanisms in Instant Messaging

This paper presents our research on awareness support in Instant Messaging (IM). The paper starts with a brief overview of empirical study of IM, using an online survey and face-to-face interviews to identify user needs for awareness support. The study identified a need for supporting four aspects of awareness, awareness of multiple concurrent conversations, conversational awareness, presence awareness of a group conversation, and visibility of moment-to-moment listeners and viewers. Based on the empirical study and existing research on awareness, we have developed the F@ (read as fat) framework of awareness. F@ comprises of the abstract level and the concrete level. The former includes an in-depth description of various awareness aspects in IM, whilst the latter utilises temporal logic to formalise fundamental time-related awareness aspects. F@ helps developers gain a better understanding of awareness and thereby design usable mechanisms to support awareness. Applying F@, we have designed several mechanisms to support various aspect of awareness in IM

Semi-Autonomous Avatars: A New Direction for Expressive User Embodiment

Computer animated characters are rapidly becoming a regular part of our lives. They are starting to take the place of actors in films and television and are now an integral part of most computer games. Perhaps most interestingly in on-line games and chat rooms they are representing the user visually in the form of avatars, becoming our on-line identities, our embodiments in a virtual world. Currently online environments such as “Second Life” are being taken up by people who would not traditionally have considered playing games before, largely due to a greater emphasis on social interaction. These environments require avatars that are more expressive and that can make on-line social interactions seem more like face-to-face conversations. Computer animated characters come in many different forms. Film characters require a substantial amount of off-line animator effort to achieve high levels of quality; these techniques are not suitable for real time applications and are not the focus of this chapter. Non-player characters (typically the bad guys) in games use limited artificial intelligence to react autonomously to events in real time. However avatars are completely controlled by their users, reacting to events solely through user commands. This chapter will discuss the distinction between fully autonomous characters and completely controlled avatars and how the current differentiation may no longer be useful, given that avatar technology may need to include more autonomy to live up to the demands of mass appeal. We will firstly discuss the two categories and present reasons to combine them. We will then describe previous work in this area and finally present our own framework for semi-autonomous avatars

‘It’s Almost Like Talking to a Person’: Student Disclosure to Pedagogical Agents in Sensitive Settings.

This paper presents findings of a pilot study which used pedagogical agents to examine disclosure in educational settings. The study used responsive evaluation to explore how use of pedagogical agents might affect students’ truthfulness and disclosure by asking them to respond to a lifestyle choices survey delivered by a web-based pedagogical agent. Findings indicate that emotional connection with pedagogical agents were intrinsic to the user’s sense of trust and therefore likely to affect levels of truthfulness and engagement. The implications of this study are that truthfulness, personalisation and emotional engagement are all vital components in using pedagogical agents to enhance online learning

Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

On the Development of Adaptive and User-Centred Interactive Multimodal Interfaces

Multimodal systems have attained increased attention in recent years, which has made possible important improvements in the technologies for recognition, processing, and generation of multimodal information. However, there are still many issues related to multimodality which are not clear, for example, the principles that make it possible to resemble human-human multimodal communication. This chapter focuses on some of the most important challenges that researchers have recently envisioned for future multimodal interfaces. It also describes current efforts to develop intelligent, adaptive, proactive, portable and affective multimodal interfaces