Employing Virtual Humans for Interaction, Assistance and Information Provision in Ambient Intelligence Environments

This paper reports on the design, development and evaluation of a framework which implements virtual humans for information provision. The framework can be used to create interactive multimedia information visualizations e.g., images, text, audio, videos, 3D models and provides a dynamic data modeling mechanism for storage and retrieval and implements communication through multimodal interaction techniques. The interaction may involve human-to-agent, agent-to-environment or agent-to-agent communication. The framework supports alternative roles for the virtual agents who may act as assistants for existing systems, standalone "applications" or even as integral parts of emerging smart environments. Finally, an evaluation study was conducted with the participation of 10 people to study the developed system in terms of usability and effectiveness, when it is employed as an assisting mechanism for another application. The evaluation results were highly positive and promising, confirming the system's usability and encouraging further research in this area.