An Evolutionary Perspective on Animated Presentation Agents and their Application Fields

Dr.-Ing. Thomas Rist

Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI)

D-66123 Saarbrücken

The last decade has seen a general trend in HCI to make human-computer dialogue more like human-human dialogue. Computers are ever less viewed as tools and ever more as partners or assistants to whom tasks may be delegated. Trying to imitate the skills of human presenters, some R&D projects have begun to deploy animated agents (or characters) in wide range of different application areas including e-Commerce, entertainment, personal assistants, training / electronic learning environments. Based either on cartoon drawings, recorded video images of persons, or 3D body models, such agents provide a promising option for interface development as they allow us to draw on communication and interaction styles humans are well familiar with. DFKI has contributed to this area of research by introducing a plan-based approach to automate the process of writing scripts that control and constrain the behaviour of presentation agents. This approach has been successfully applied to build a number of applications in which information is conveyed either by a single presenter or by a team of presentation agents. Looking at past and current projects conducted at DFKI we observe an ongoing evolution of character-based presentation systems. As depicted in Figure 1, this evolution starts from systems in which a character presents information content in the style of a TV-presenter. The evolution moves on with the introduction of presentation teams that convey information to the user by performing role plays. In order to explore new forms of active user involvement during a presentation, the next step may lead to systems that convey information in the style of interactive performances. From a technical point of view, this evolution is mirrored in different approaches to determine the behavior of the employed characters.

Fig. 1 Ongoing evolution of presentation systems deploying life-like characters

In this talk we present and discuss a number of selected sample systems that we have been built in the past years as well as systems which are currently under development at DFKI. Among these samples are research prototypes either funded by the German Ministry for education and Research or by the European Commission, and also pilot systems developed for industrial partners.