A Quiz Game Console Based on a Generic Embodied Conversational Agent Framework Hung-Hsuan Huang1, Taku Inoue1, Aleksandra Cerekovic2, Igor S. Pandzic2, Yukiko Nakano3 and Toyoaki Nishida1 1
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia 3 Department of Computer, Information and Communication Sciences, Tokyo University of Agriculture & Technology, Japan
2
{huang, inoue, nishida}@ii.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp, {aleksandra.cerekovic, igor.pandzic}@fer.hr,
[email protected] This article describes an attempt to build a quiz game kiosk for show-room use based on the Generic Embodied Conversational Agent (GECA) Framework [1] that provides a general purpose architecture for connecting modularized ECA functional components for multimodal human-agent interactions. GECA Framework is composed of three parts: GECA Platform provides common services and the facilities for low-level communication among components via XML message exchanging on shared blackboards, GECA Plugs are communication and utility APIs that absorb the differences caused by operating systems and programming languages to facilitate the development of component wrappers, GECA Protocol (GECAP) is an extensible specification of core message types and XML message format exchanged among the components. To simplify the problem, available agenthuman interactions are described in a script language, GSML (GECA Scenario Markup Language) that is inspired from AIML [2]. So far, a mediating server and a set of standard GECA components include Japanese spontaneous gesture generator [3], head tracker, hand shape recognizer, head nodding recognizer, GSML executor, speech recognizer and an animator [4] have been developed. On the other hand, the quiz game kiosk project is initiated to fulfill the demands of our client, the National Food Research Institute (NFRI) of Japan. They hold several open lab events every year and concern how to attract more visitors and how to improve the efficiency in knowledge conveyance of their research results and general educational materials to public audiences. What we conducted is to build a game console with an ECA issuing quizzes based on the following hypothesizes: comparing to static exhibits, an exhibition which the visitors can participate in should be more attractive, an embodied character who issues quizzes and explains the correct answers should make the contents more understandable and earn the visitors’ concentration. The resulted prototype is built by combining standard GECA components, GSML executor, animator and the GECA server with two additional components, a touch panel component and an emotion component. Touch panel was chosen here as the user interface because the nature of public exhibition is not appropriate to use complex sensors. To enhance the life-likeliness of the agent, the emotion component is introduced to control the agent’s facial expression and the background music. It
DV Camera
Laptop PC
Touch Panel Projector Desktop PC
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Fig. 1. The configuration of the NFRI quiz agent and actual circumstance of the open lab event
is basically an implementation of the PAD space model proposed in Becker el [5]. The quiz agent gets positive stimulation on emotion and mood axes when the visitor tries to answer the quiz, gets even higher values if the answer is correct and perceives negative stimulation when the answer is wrong. The value on boredom axis grows when there is no input from the visitor while time goes by. The emotion component continuously changes its internal state to drive the agent to shows 8 facial expressions and play 14 background melodies depending on the current state like angry, bored, concentrated, friendly, etc. This quiz kiosk (see Fig. 1) was shown in a one-day public open lab event of NFRI on April 20th, 2007 and was the first real-life use of GECA agents. Typical visitors were the people who study or live in the neighborhood. Each game session contains 10 quizzes relating to general knowledge about food science. The quizzes are selected randomly from a total number of 43. In the six-hour event time, there were totally 307 visitors in small groups played the kiosk and initiated 87 game sessions. Almost during the whole day, there were dozens of visitors waiting for playing the game, therefore we considered that the basic idea was very successful in attracting the visitors. Besides, from questionnaire investigation, most of the visitors reported that they enjoyed the game and felt that the knowledge explained by the agent is trustable. Overall, because the success obtained in this event, the constant setup of this kiosk in the showroom of NFRI is scheduled from October 2007.
References 1. Huang, H., Cerekovic, A., Pandzic, I., Nakano, Y. and Nishida, T.: A Script Driven Multimodal Embodied Conversational Agent Based on a Generic Framework, IVA07, Paris, France, September 2007 2. Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML), http://www.alicebot.org/ 3. Nakano, Y., Okamoto, M., Kawahara, D., Li Q., Nishida, T.: Converting Text into Agent Animations: Assigning Gestures to Text, in Proceedings of The Human Language Technology Conference, 2004 4. visage|SDK, visage technologies, http://www.visagetechnologies.com/index.html 5. Becker, C., Kopp, S., and Wachsmuth, I. Simulating the emotion dynamics of a multimodal conversational agent. In Proceedings on Tutorial and Research Workshop on Affective Dialogue Systems (ADS-04), pp154-165, 2004
