Deictic Believability: Coordinated Gesture, Locomotion, and Speech in Lifelike Pedagogical Agents

Lifelike animated agents for knowledge-based learning environments can provide timely, customized advice to support students' problem solving. Because of their strong visual presence, they hold signi cant promise for substantially increasing students' enjoyment of their learning experiences. A key problem posed by lifelike agents that inhabit arti cial worlds is deictic believability. In the same manner that humans refer to objects in their environment through judicious combinations of speech, locomotion, and gesture, animated agents should be able to movethrough their environment, and point to and refer to objects appropriately as they provide problem-solving advice. In this paper we describe a framework for achieving deictic believability in animated agents. A deictic behavior planner exploits a world model and the evolving explanation plan as it selects and coordinates locomotive, gestural, and speech behaviors. The resulting behaviors and utterances are believable, and t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1999
• Where: AAI
• Authors: James C. Lester, Jennifer L. Voerman, Stuart G. Towns, Charles B. Callaway
• Keywords: AAI 1999, Animated Agent, Deictic Believability, Learning Environment