Empathic Interaction with a Virtual Guide

The Empathic Tour Guide System is a context-aware mobile system, including an ‘intelligent empathic guide with attitude’, offering the user a seamless, temporally and spatially dependent, multi-modal interaction interface. It will consist of two virtual agents each possessing a contrasting personality, presenting users with different versions of the story of the same event or place. An Emergent Empathic Model with Personality is proposed as a mechanism for action selection and affective processing. The system will mould to the behavior of the users and facilitate their movement, applying story-telling techniques which link the memory and interests of the guide as well as the visitor to the spatial location so that stories are relevant to what can be immediately seen, creating personalised communication. Multisensory systems will be integrated with the PDA, adopting wireless technology. Detection of the user’s current physical position will be performed by a Global Positioning System. This paper presents a review of related work, the proposed system, consideration of the challenges in system design and development as well as a discussion on future work to be carried out.

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