ECA Perspectives - Requirements, Applications, Technology

Abstract

In the last years we have developed a platform for 
the realization of embodied (conversational) 
agents, in a distributed logic programming 
framework. In this paper we will present an 
overview of our work, by discussing the 
requirements that acted as our guidelines for 
design decisions during development, some of the 
applications that have served as target 
demonstrators for developing and testing new 
functionality, and the (distributed logic 
programming) technology which we used for the 
realization of the platform and the implementation 
of our STEP scripting language. 

Although the focus of our paper will primarily be 
our own DLP+X3D platform, we believe that our 
discussion along the perspectives of requirements, 
applications and technology might be more generally 
worthwhile in establishing the relative merits of 
the operational use of ECA-technology. At the end 
of this paper, we will moreover provide some hints 
of how to approach the experimental validation of 
the (possible) benefits of embodied conversational 
agents in user applications.