Webpersona: a Life-like Presentation Agent for the World-wide Web

Rapid growth of competition on the electronic market place, will generate the demand for new innovative communication styles with web users. In this paper, we develop an operational approach for the automated generation of hypermedia presentations. Unlike conventional hypermedia, we use a lifelike presentation agent which presents the generated material, and guides the user through a dynamically expanding navigation space. The approach relies on a model that combines behavior planning for lifelike characters with concepts from hypermedia authoring such as timeline structures and navigation graphs.

[1]  James F. Allen.  Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals , 1983, CACM.

[2]  Wolfgang Wahlster,et al.  WIP: The Automatic Synthesis of Multimodal Presentations , 1991, AAAI Workshop on Intelligent Multimedia Interfaces.

[3]  Vicki de Mey,et al.  Video widgets and video actors , 1993, UIST '93.

[4]  Norman I. Badler,et al.  Simulating humans: computer graphics animation and control , 1993 .

[5]  Akikazu Takeuchi,et al.  Communicative facial displays as a new conversational modality , 1993, INTERCHI.

[6]  Dick C. A. Bulterman,et al.  The Amsterdam hypermedia model: adding time and context to the Dexter model , 1994, CACM.

[7]  Lee Sproull,et al.  Using a human face in an interface , 1994, CHI '94.

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

[9]  Thomas Rist,et al.  Coping with Temporal Constraints in Multimedia Presentation Planning , 1996, AAAI/IAAI, Vol. 1.

[10]  Chris Mellish,et al.  Sources of Flexibility in Dynamic Hypertext Generation , 1996, INLG.

[11]  Ken Perlin,et al.  Improv: a system for scripting interactive actors in virtual worlds , 1996, SIGGRAPH.

[12]  Peter Brusilovsky,et al.  ELM-ART: An Intelligent Tutoring System on World Wide Web , 1996, Intelligent Tutoring Systems.

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

[14]  Gene Ball.  Dialogue Initiative in a Web Assistant , 1997 .

[15]  James C. Lester,et al.  The persona effect: affective impact of animated pedagogical agents , 1997, CHI.

[16]  Claudio S. Pinhanez,et al.  Interval scripts: a design paradigm for story-based interactive systems , 1997, CHI.

[17]  Thomas Rist,et al.  Adding animated presentation agents to the interface , 1997, IUI '97.

[18]  Maarten van Dantzich,et al.  Lifelike computer characters: the persona project at Microsoft , 1997 .

[19]  Norman I. Badler,et al.  A Virtual Human Presenter , 1997 .

[20]  Barbara Hayes-Roth,et al.  Agents in annotated worlds , 1998, AGENTS '98.

[21]  Prem Kalra,et al.  The Simulation of a Virtual TV Presentor , 1998 .

[22]  Thomas Rist,et al.  Integrating reactive and scripted behaviors in a life-like presentation agent , 1998, AGENTS '98.