How does one go about designing a human? With the rise in recent years of virtual humans this is no longer purely a philosophical question. Virtual humans are intelligent agents with a body, often a human-like graphical body, that interact verbally and non-verbally with human users on a variety of tasks and applications. Our working group approached this question from the perspective of interactivity. Specifically, how can one design effective interactive experiences involving a virtual human, and what constraints does this goal place on the form and function of an embodied conversational agent. Our group grappled with several related questions: What ideals should designers aspire to, what sources of theory and data will best lead to this goal and what methodologies can inform and validate the design process? A longer article (.pdf) summarizes the output of this WG and suggests a specific framework, borrowed from interactive media design, as a vehicle for advancing the state of interactive experiences with virtual humans.
@InProceedings{gratch_et_al:DagSemProc.04121.2, author = {Gratch, Jonathan and Egges, Arjan and Eliens, Anton and Isbister, Katherine and Marsella, Stacy and Paiva, Ana and Rist, Thomas and ten Hagen, Paul}, title = {{04121 Working Group 2 – Design criteria, techniques and case studies for creating and evaluating interactive experiences for virtual humans}}, booktitle = {Evaluating Embodied Conversational Agents}, pages = {1--6}, series = {Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings (DagSemProc)}, ISSN = {1862-4405}, year = {2006}, volume = {4121}, editor = {Zsofia Ruttkay and Elisabeth Andr\'{e} and W. Lewis Johnson and Catherine Pelachaud}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DagSemProc.04121.2}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-4621}, doi = {10.4230/DagSemProc.04121.2}, annote = {Keywords: } }
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