Coherent Gestures, Locomotion, and Speech in Life-like Pedagogical Agents

Life-likeanimatedinterfaceagentsforknowledge-basedlearning environments can provide timely, customized advice to support students’ problem solving. Because of their strong visual presence, they hold significant promise for substantially increasing students’ enjoyment of their learning experiences. A key problem posed by life-like agents that inhabit artificial 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 move through their environment, and point to and refer to objects appropriately as they provide problem-solving advice. In this paper we describe a frameworkforachieving deictic believabilityinanimated agents. A deictic behavior planner exploits a worldmodel andthe evolving explanation plan as it selects and coordinates locomotive, gestural, and speech behaviors. The resulting behaviors and utterances are believable, and th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: IUI
• Authors: Stuart G. Towns, Jennifer L. Voerman, Charles B. Callaway, James C. Lester
• Keywords: Deictic, Deictic Behavior Planner, Deictic Believabilityinanimated Agents, IUI 1998, Software Engineering