A Case Study in Multimodal Interaction Design for Autonomous Game Characters

This paper presents our experience of designing the educational collaborative role-play game ORIENT with a special focus on the multimodal interaction used in the game. The idea behind ORIENT is to try increasing a user’s intercultural empathy through role-play set in a science fiction narrative in which the users have to befriend an alien race, the Sprytes. The Sprytes are virtual characters that communicate with the users through a mix of gestures and natural language. We explain how the choice and design of those output modalities was driven by choice of interaction technology. We also show how the user’s perception of the Spryte’s behaviour could be enhanced through the inclusion of an assistive agent, the ORACLE and report on a small scale evaluation of the system and its interaction technology.

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