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Embodied Conversational Agent Avatars in Virtual Worlds: Making Today’s Immersive Environments More Responsive to Participants

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Abstract

Intelligent agents in the form of avatars in networked virtual worlds (VWs) are a new form of embodied conversational agent (ECA). They are still a topic of active research, but promise soon to rival the sophistication of virtual human agents developed on stand-alone platforms over the last decade. Such agents in today’s VWs grew out of two lines of historical research: Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence. Their merger forms the basis for today’s persistent 3D worlds occupied by intelligent characters serving a wide range of purposes. We believe ECA avatars will help to enable VWs to achieve a higher level of meaningful interaction by providing increased engagement and responsiveness within environments where people will interact with and even develop relationships with them.

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Acknowledgments

Some of the projects described herein have been sponsored by the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM). Statements and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the United States Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred. We would like to thank the many talented members of all the interdisciplinary teams that comprise the Virtual Human research group at the ICT for their dedicated work and contributions that enabled the adaptation of virtual human technology to virtual worlds. More about their work can be found at www.ict.usc.edu.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Playa Vista, 90094, CA, USA

    Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Eric Chance, Kip Haynes & Dinesh Rajpurohit

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  1. Jacquelyn Ford Morie
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  2. Eric Chance
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  4. Dinesh Rajpurohit
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Correspondence to Jacquelyn Ford Morie .

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  1. , School of Computer and Security Science, Edith Cowan University, Building 13.148, 2 Bradford Street, Mount Lawley, 6050, West Australia, Australia

    Philip Hingston

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Morie, J.F., Chance, E., Haynes, K., Rajpurohit, D. (2013). Embodied Conversational Agent Avatars in Virtual Worlds: Making Today’s Immersive Environments More Responsive to Participants. In: Hingston, P. (eds) Believable Bots. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32323-2_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32323-2_4

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