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6 - Attention-aware intelligent embodied agents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2011

By
Benoît Morel  and
Laurent Ach
Edited by
Claudia Roda
Claudia Roda
Affiliation:
The American University of Paris, France
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Summary

This chapter describes how intelligent embodied agents may react according to end-users' attention states and how these agents may adapt their interventions to encourage end users to participate actively in virtual environments such as collaboration platforms or e-learning modules. Attention-related data are taken into account by adapting generically defined interventions (templates) to particular contexts through the use of scripting and markup languages. This chapter introduces the Living Actor™ technology, whose main purpose is to provide end users with high-quality adaptive embodied agents, or avatars. Living Actor™ technology receives input from software components' reasoning on users' attention states and adjusts the actions of its embodied agents. The result is the creation of embodied agents, or avatars, that are capable of natural, intuitive, autonomous and adaptive behaviours that account for variations in emotion, gesture, mood, voice, culture and personality.

Introduction

According to Gartner (April 2007), by the end of 2011, 80 per cent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a ‘second life’, not necessarily in the virtual world, called Second Life. Users' virtual lives will be represented by embodied agents in the form of avatars, or virtual representations of the self which allow users to express themselves with a personalized identity of their own creation. In the present chapter the authors define agents as ‘soft- and/or hardware that is intended to represent a complete person, animal, or personality’ (Sengers 2004: 4).

Type
Chapter
Information
Human Attention in Digital Environments , pp. 147 - 165
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

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