User centred virtual actor technology

Daphne Economou, William Mitchell, Steve Pettifer, Jon Cook, James Marsh
2001 Proceedings of the 2001 conference on Virtual reality, archeology, and cultural heritage - VAST '01  
This paper argues that the development of virtual actor technology must be guided by application and end user needs. Two objectives drive the development of the 'Senet' project described in this paper: to develop a set of design guidelines for the use of virtual actors in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) for learning, and to inform the development of the underlying virtual actor technology following a user centred approach. The methodological approach followed involves the development
more » ... f prototype virtual learning environments in a series of distinct phases. These are based on an ancient Egyptian game (senet) and are aimed at children at Key Stage Level 2 of the National Curriculum for education in England. Two-dimensional multimedia technology has been used to develop robust prototypes, which were then observed in use by children. The result of this study derived a set of design guidelines, which were then used to guide the implementation of a 3D CVE using the Deva CVE technology. Keywords Collaborative virtual environments, pedagogy, evaluation, interaction analysis, design guidelines, technology requirements. Recent years have seen a growing amount of research on the use of pedagogical agents [22] . Particularly important are animated pedagogical agents due to their ability to communicate nonverbally using gestures, gaze, facial expressions, and locomotion. Students perceive such agents as being very helpful, credible and entertaining [27] . One such example is Steve (Soar Training Expert for Virtual Environments), which focuses on multimodal behaviour generation and multimodal input [33] . Steve is an animated agent that can collaborate with human students in virtual worlds, with children were co-located in the same room, external communication (such as whispering) provided an effective means of private communication to answer each other's queries and decide upon turn taking. Similar communication internal to the system had the effect of "disrupting" other activities. An efficient way of supporting private communication channels internal to the environment needs to be provided. DG19: a virtual actor should show when the user is involved in private communication. Private communication was accompanied by nonverbal behaviour (e.g. a child leaning from the side of their computer to see the child they were whispering to). It also follows on from DG12. TEACHER VIRTUAL ACTORS DG20 to DG22 address issues regarding knowledgeable user's behaviour and controls over other users in the CVEs for learning. DG20: the teacher should have control over an individual user's viewpoint. Observations showed that one of the most important interactions was the teacher directing and focusing the children's attention on an on-going activities (e.g. a demonstration), or a certain part of the screen (e.g. a certain part of the rules). This is also supported in the literature [42] . DG21: the teacher should be in able to take control of the session. The biggest problem faced by the expert in the second phase, was the number of times she was literally not in control in the environment. Whether it was due to lag or the child's lack of awareness of the expert's intended action it is not a situation that a teacher would want to see arise. The expert needs to be able to keep order. In the second phase study, this was done by asking the children to stop activities. In some cases this was difficult if one of the children had control of the pointer (and thus control of the interaction). A more direct means of taking control (e.g. freezing user actions) is needed. DG22: the teacher should be aware of and have control over private communication between children. Following on from DG19, the expert needs to be able to monitor private communication to make sure the children or "on task" or to decide whether an intervention is necessary. Third phase The design guidelines identified in the previous two phases guided the design of the third phase prototype. The technology used is the Deva 3D CVE tool developed by Manchester University [31] . User studies of this environment allow the design factors identified previously to be tested. The results of these studies will in turn be used to guide the development of the underlying Deva technology.
doi:10.1145/584993.585052 dblp:conf/vast/EconomouMPCM01 fatcat:jheobp2gcrcizivkyqvytq55p4