1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. user engagement with empathic agents

5. 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

7. PEFiC in digital dossiers

11. ...  navigation -- pure interactivity  guided tours -- using some narrative structure  agent-mediated -- navigation and guided tours evaluation scenarios

12. development of the MetaMorph box 64 systematically varied agent types task relevance valence ethics aesthetics ephistemics

13. interactive PEFiC powered by DLP/STEP

14.  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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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: