Abstract
Human to virtual human interaction is the next frontier in interface design, particularly for tasks that are social or collaborative in nature. Several embodied interface agents have been developed for specific social, place-related tasks, but empirical evaluations of these systems have been rare. In this work, we present Marve (Messaging And Recognition Virtual Entity), our general purpose Virtual Human Interface Framework, which integrates cutting-edge interface technologies into a seamless real-time system, to study human to virtual human interaction. Marve is a prototype of a real-time embodied, interactive, autonomous, virtual human interface agent framework. Marve “lives” next to the primary entrance of the Future Computing Lab. His primary tasks are to greet everyone who enters or leaves the lab, and to take and deliver messages to the students and faculty who work there. Marve uses computer vision techniques for passer-by detection, gaze tracking, and face recognition, and communicates via natural language. We present a preliminary empirical study of the basic elements of Marve, including interaction response times, recognition of friends, and ability to learn to recognize new people.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Isbester, K., Doyle, P.: Design and Evaluation of Embodied Conversational Agents: A Proposed Taxonomy. In: AAMAS Workshop: Embodied Conversatinal Agents (2002)
Nass, C., Steuer, J., Tauber, E.: Computers are social actors. In: Proceedings of CHI 1994, Boston MA (1994)
Catrambone, R., Stasko, J., Xiao, J.: Anthropomorphic Agents as a User Interface Paradigm: Experimental Findings and a Framework for Research. In: Proceedings of CogSci 2002, pp. 166–171 (2002)
Thorisson, K.: Real-time decision making in multimodal face-to-face communication. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 16–23 (1998)
Cassell, J.: Embodied conversational interface agents. Communications of ACM 43, 70–78 (2000)
Cassell, J., Sullivan, J., Prevost, S., Churchill, E.: Embodied Conversational Agents. MIT Press, Cambridge (2000)
Badler, N., Bindiganavale, R., Allbeck, J., Schuler, W., Zhao, L., Lee, S., Shin, H., Palmer, M.: Parameterized action representation and natural language instructions for dynamic behavior modification of embodied agents. AAAI, Menlo Park (1999)
Evers, M., Nijholt, A.: Jacob – An animated instruction agent in virtual reality. In: Proceedings 3rd International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2000), pp. 526–533 (2000)
Thalmann, D.: The Virtual Human as a Multimodal Interface. Proceedings of Advanced visual interfaces, 14–20 (2000)
Ulicny, B., Thalmann, D.: Crowd simulation for virtual heritage. In: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on 3D Virtual Heritage, pp. 28–32 (2002)
Brave, S., Nass, C.: Emotion in human-computer interaction. In: The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications, Hillside, NJ, ch. 4 (2002)
Taylor II, R.M., Hudson, T.C., Seeger, A., Webber, H., Juliano, J., Helser, A.T.: VRPN: a device-independent, network-transparent VR peripheral system. In: Proceedings of ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology, pp. 55–61. ACM Press, New York (2001)
Nefian, A.V., Hayes, M.H.: An Embedded HMM-Based Approach for Face Detection and Recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, vol. 6, pp. 3553–3556 (1999)
Sukthankar, R., Stockton, R.: Argus: The Digital Doorman. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Systems, pp. 14–19 (2001)
Takeuchi, Y., Katagiri, Y.: Social Character Design for Animated Agents. RO-MAN 1999 (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Babu, S., Schmugge, S., Inugala, R., Rao, S., Barnes, T., Hodges, L.F. (2005). Marve: A Prototype Virtual Human Interface Framework for Studying Human-Virtual Human Interaction. In: Panayiotopoulos, T., Gratch, J., Aylett, R., Ballin, D., Olivier, P., Rist, T. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3661. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11550617_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11550617_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28738-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-28739-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)