ECA Perspectives - Requirements, applications, technology
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 technol-
ogy 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) benets of
embodied conversational agents in user
applications.