Year: 1999
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Because of their multimodal communicative abilities and strong visual presence, animated pedagogical agents offer significant promise for 3D learning environments.We describe a new class of animated pedagogical agents, explanatory lifelike avatars, which can perform user-designed tasks in rich 3D worlds.By generating task networks to perform student-designed tasks, an avatar task planner constructs and interprets action specifications that it then interprets within the geometries of the 3D environment to generate navigational, manipulative, and verbal behaviors.Filmed by a narrative camera planner in the 3D world, the avatars perform students' tasks and accompanies them with running verbal explanations in realtime.The explanatory lifelike avatar framework has been implemented in a full-scale avatar for the CPU CITY learning environment, a 3D learning environment for the domain of computer architecture and systems for novices.To investigate the effectiveness of this approach, a novel four-way comparative usability study was conducted with an "agentless" world, a disembodied narrator, a mute lifelike avatar, and a fullscale explanatory avatar.Results of the study suggest that explanatory lifelike avatars hold much promise for learning environments.
Institution: North Carolina State University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1986290426