Agents with Character Evaluation of Empathic Agents in Digital Dossiers Johan F. Hoorn Anton Eliëns Zhisheng Huang Henriette C. van Vugt Elly A. Konijn Cees T. Visser Communication Science Artificial Intelligence Information Management & Software Engineering VU Amsterdam
structure introduction user engagement with empathic agents PEFiC in digital dossiers evaluation scenarios development of the MetaMorph box interactive PEFiC powered by DLP/STEP some issues and pitfalls conclusions
carry back home message an empirically tested model of engaging fiction characters (PEFiC) test scenarios in the real-life application domain of digital dossiers DLP+X3D/STEP technology to support virtual environments and characters all the ingredients needed to conduct proper agent research
user engagement with empathic agents
embodied agents as fictional characters phase 1 -- encoding ethics -- good vs. bad aesthetics -- beauty vs ugliness epistemics -- realistic vs. unrealistic phase 2 -- comparison establishing personal relevance, mutual similarity and valence towards fictional character phase 3 -- response involvement vs distance -- tendency to approach or avoid PEFiC
PEFiC in digital dossiers
... navigation -- pure interactivity guided tours -- using some narrative structure agent-mediated -- navigation and guided tours evaluation scenarios
development of the MetaMorph box 64 systematically varied agent types task relevance valence ethics aesthetics ephistemics
interactive PEFiC powered by DLP/STEP
declarative language -- for agent support multiple threads of control -- for multiple shared objects distributed communication -- networking capabilities (TCP/IP) programming platform DLP/STEP convenience -- for non-professional authors compositional semantics -- combining operations re-definability -- for high-level specification of actions parametrization -- for the adaptation of actions interaction -- with a (virtual) environment scripting behavior
agents in multi-user virtual environments mixed-media presentations with commentators Tai-Chi, domestic servants and conducting music tai-chi demonstrator grasping and reaching, using inverse kinematics and reasoning facial animation (with text-to-speech) virtual presenter -- presenting powerpoint presentation DLP/STEP applications
some issues and pitfalls complexity of domain of cultural heritage limited number of experts with sufficient knowlegde task: prepare an installation of a work of art in a museum we should restrict the user’s task to exploration or tasks requiring limited expertise
conclusions an empirically tested model of engaging fiction characters (PEFiC) test scenarios in the real-life application domain of digital dossiers DLP+X3D/STEP technology to support virtual environments and characters all the ingredients needed to conduct proper agent research we presented: