Life-like Agents: Cross-Cultural Study
The main reason for bringing life-like characters onto the internet is commercial. They may attract users to a particular page and encourage them to log on more often and/or stay longer than otherwise in the application. This is of course advantageous for providers selling advertising.
In the following we describe Flirtboat, a commercial multi-user application for the internet where users design their representatives and send them off to a virtual community (a net environment), and we present user data we have collected so far from launches of this application in three
different countries: Austria, the UK and Croatia.
We have collected basic usage data from cross-cultural launches of the Flirtboat application, such as the number of agents in an application, the frequency of user logins to their avatars, the distribution of female and male characters, the assignment of a certain age, personality and particular looks to one’s virtual representative. As we have gathered data from the same type of application but from launches in different countries this help us to lay a foundation for a better understanding of the potential of applications featuring animated characters.
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