Intelligent Tutoring in Virtual Reality: A Preliminary Report

Virtual reality simulation environments ooer exciting opportunities and challenges for intelligent tutoring systems. Students, immersed in a 3D computer simulation of their work environment, improve their skills through practice on realistic tasks. Computer tutors can inhabit the virtual world along with students, allowing them to physically collaborate with students on tasks, and they can interact and communicate in nonverbal ways that would be impossible with a traditional disembodied computer tutor. This paper discusses these opportunities and challenges, as well as our progress in addressing them in our pedagogical agent Steve.

[1]  Earl David Sacerdoti,et al.  A Structure for Plans and Behavior , 1977 .

[2]  Susan E. Newman,et al.  Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the Craft of Reading, Writing, and Mathematics. Technical Report No. 403. , 1987 .

[3]  Allen Newell,et al.  SOAR: An Architecture for General Intelligence , 1987, Artif. Intell..

[4]  David A. McAllester,et al.  Systematic Nonlinear Planning , 1991, AAAI.

[5]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Animated conversation: rule-based generation of facial expression, gesture & spoken intonation for multiple conversational agents , 1994, SIGGRAPH.

[6]  Mark T. Maybury,et al.  Intelligent multimedia interfaces , 1994, CHI Conference Companion.

[7]  Daniel S. Weld An Introduction to Least Commitment Planning , 1994, AI Mag..

[8]  Christopher W. Geib,et al.  SodaJack: An Architecture For Agents That Search For And Manipulate Objects , 1994 .

[9]  Norman I. Badler,et al.  How Animated Agents Perform Tasks: Connecting Planning and Manipulation Through Object-Specific Reasoning , 1994 .

[10]  W. Lewis Johnson,et al.  Agents that Learn to Explain Themselves , 1994, AAAI.

[11]  W. Johnson,et al.  Situated plan attribution , 1995 .

[12]  Peter Norvig,et al.  A modern, agent-oriented approach to introductory artificial intelligence , 1995, SGAR.

[13]  John R. Anderson,et al.  Cognitive Tutors: Lessons Learned , 1995 .

[14]  James C. Lester,et al.  Dynamically Sequencing an Animated Pedagogical Agent , 1997, AAAI/IAAI, Vol. 1.

[15]  Mark Billinghurst,et al.  Adding intelligence to the interface , 1996, Proceedings of the IEEE 1996 Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium.

[16]  W. Lewis Johnson,et al.  Integrating pedagogical capabilities in a virtual environment agent , 1997, AGENTS '97.