Agent's Appearance news

Experience a foreign or distant world without actually being there: Japanese researchers leaded by professor Susumu Tachi at Tachi Laboratory have developed Telesar V Robot Avatar which delivers a remote experience straight to its operator by transmitting sight, sound and touch data. You can actually feel the shape and surface unevenness, and also the temperature of objects.

Children with autism can develop skills they normally find difficult by interacting with virtual worlds. By using multitouch, these children activate a virtual character on a screen and experiment with different social scenarios. This way, researchers can compare their responses to those displayed in real-life situations.

Researchers from Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University have been investigating haptic interfaces that allow users to feel virtual elements through touch. Such tactile touch screens provide users with a wide variety of tactile sensations such as textures, friction and vibration.

Various airports (such as Paris, London, Birmingham and Manchester) are experimenting with so-called virtual boarding agents, these are virtual agents which for example kindly greet passengers when boarding or explain security measures before going through customs.

Blue Mars is a 3D virtual world platform enabling users to meet, chat and share their common digital experiences. Blue Mars Lite application goes one step further: Meet other avatars in real-world locations on Google Street View.

The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HIT Lab NZ) is developing and commercializing technology that improves human computer interaction and by doing so unlocks the power of human intelligence.

Now, they have been able to add virtual agent Greta, an agent specifically designed for research, to reality. Check it out, this is really cool of how the future will look like!

At the Computer Human Interaction conference in Atlanta (12/5/2010), Simon the Robot demonstrated he has more capabilities than before. Originally he was only able to move some blocks very slowly, now he is capable of learning household chores without commanding him all over again or having to pre program him with a set of tasks. For example, Simon identifies colourful items: a blue book, a green plastic case, a red flower and several others, and puts them into the corresponding colours bin.

Small Worlds is a fast-growing online virtual world that runs in a browser instead of requiring you to download a graphics-intensive application. Members of Smallworlds create avatars and use these to have shared experiences like chatting, watching videos, playing games, or listening to music.

Pandorabots is a chat bot hosting service. From any browser, you may create and publish your own bots for web pages, instant messenger services, virtual worlds and many other places. Pandorabots utilizes a patented memory management algorithm that scales in number of bots, amount of bot knowledge, and number of conversational interactions. The bots are based on AIML and spring entirely from the work of the A.L.I.C.E. and AIML free software community.

The world’s first sex robot ‘Roxxxy’ by TrueCompanion knows your name, your likes and dislikes, can carry on a discussion and expresses her love to you and be your loving friend. She can talk to you, listen to you and feel your touch.

An online game promoting the new movie Sherlock Holmes is offering players a new sort of gaming experience. The aim is to interview suspects - as Dr Watson or Holmes - to solve a robbery at the British Museum. Thanks to novel conversational “chatbots” embedded in the game, players can use natural language in their typed interrogations.

Other games have used natural language interactions before, says Rollo Carpenter, founder of Existor, the company behind the game, but these only use keywords to try to recognise what players are saying, he claims. “My script technology works by making predictions about what people will say,” he says. It then uses statistical analysis and fuzzy logic to try to find the best match for what was said against this vast number of predictions, before supplying the appropriate response.