Papers

A chatbot named Freudbot was constructed using the open source architecture of AIML to determine if a famous person application of chatbot technology could improve student-content interaction in distance education. Fifty-three students in psychology completed a study in which they chatted with Freudbot over the web for 10 minutes under one of two instructional sets. They then completed a questionnaire to provide information about their experience and demographic variables. The results from the questionnaire indicated... Read more

It has become increasingly common for websites and computer media to provide computer generated visual images, called avatars, to represent users and bots during online interactions. In this study "The Influence of the Avatar on Online Perceptions of Anthropomorphism, Androgyny, Credibility, Homophily, and Attraction ", participants (N=255) evaluated a series of avatars in a static context in terms of their androgyny, anthropomorphism, credibility, homophily, attraction, and the likelihood they would choose them during an interaction.... Read more

This paper presents a novel approach to produce a realistic 3D face model from multi-view face images. To extract facial region and facial feature points from color image a new nonparametric skin color model that is proposed. Conventionally used parametric skin color models for face detection have lack of robustness for varying lighting conditions and need extra work. To resolve the limitation of current skin color model, we exploit the Hue-Tint chrominance components and represent... Read more

We studied the role of the competence of an interface agent that helped users to learn and use a text editor. Participants in the study made a set of changes to a document with the aid of one of four interface agents. The agent would respond to participants’ spoken questions as well as make proactive suggestions using a synthesized voice. The agents varied in the quality of responses and... Read more

Individuality of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) may depend on both the look of the agent and the way it combines different modalities such as speech and gesture. In this chapter, we describe a study in which male and female users had to listen to three short technical presentations made by ECAs. Three multimodal strategies of ECAs for using arm gestures with speech were compared: redundancy, complementarity, and speech-specialization. These strategies were randomly attributed to different-looking... Read more

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... Read more

Avatars play an important role in international online communities. While certain simple expressions, such as facial emotional expressions are cultural independent, more complex expressions might not be. Therefore we conducted a cross-cultural study to investigate the influence of the users’ cultural background (Japanese or Dutch) on their perception of avatar’s expressions in terms of perceived arousal and valence. A significant gender difference was found for valence. Women and in particular Japanese women rated the expressions more... Read more

Pedagogical theory of today gives high priority to social components of learning. Within the field of computer supported learning there are many attempts to acknowledge this. One approach involves the addition of virtual characters to electronic learning environments. Such character enhanced systems are the focus of the present article. Firstly, a systematic overview is given of pedagogical benefits that have been proposed in the literature regarding character enhancement of electronic learning environments, for example... Read more

In this paper, we propose some reflections on how an Embodied Animated Agent might be designed so as to adapt its behavior to the cultural context to which it applies. We start from a discussion of the meaning of the term ’culture’, to then analyse the literature findings about the way human beings’ behavior (natural language expression, affect feeling and display, verbal and nonverbal components of their communication and so on) varies according to the culture.... Read more

There are currently no evaluation methods specific to ECAs in CVEs and traditional evaluation methods are limited in their applicability and consequently unlikely to address the full range of aspects now inherent in such systems. We argue that a combination of controlled experimentation, quasi-experiments, review-based evaluation and heuristic expert reviews is needed. To operationalise these traditional evaluation methods the concept of presence was deployed, and it was argued that presence as a cognitive variable can... Read more