Abstract for Deictic Believability: Coordinating Gesture, Locomotion, and Speech in Lifelike Pedagogical Agents
Applied Artificial Intelligence (1999)

      Lifelike animated agents for knowledge-based learning environments can provide timely, customized advice to support students' problem solving. Because of their strong visual presence, they hold significant promise for substantially increasing students' enjoyment of their learning experiences. A key problem posed by lifelike agents that inhabit artificial worlds is deictic believability. In the same manner that humans refer to objects in their environment through judicious combinations of speech, locomotion, and gesture, animated agents should be able to move through their environment, and point to and refer to objects appropriately as they provide problem-solving advice. In this paper we describe a framework for achieving deictic believability in animated agents. A deictic behavior planner exploits a world model and the evolving explanation plan as it selects and coordinates locomotive, gestural, and speech behaviors. The resulting behaviors and utterances are believable, and the references exhibit a lack of ambiguity. This approach to spatial deixis has been implemented in a lifelike animated agent, Cosmo, who inhabits a learning environment for the domain of Internet packet routing. Cosmo provides realtime advice to students as they escort packets through a virtual world of interconnected routers. Results of an informal focus group study with the Cosmo agent suggest that the spatial deixis framework produces clear explanatory animated behaviors.




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