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Issues and pitfalls in applying the Metamorph Box
There are a number of issues and possible pitfalls in evaluating agent characteristics
and determining the effectiveness of the agent as distinct from the effectiveness of the application.
Leaving aside technical issues in realizing the digital dossiers,
which have been discussed elsewhere
[Perspectives],
and user-related issues, such as demographic variables,
gender and personality traits, as mentioned in [Ruttkay 2004],
we will briefly indicate the design issues and potential
pitfalls in developing the experimental testbed for
the MetaMorph box.
One issue that we should mention is the complexity
of the domain of cultural heritage will make it (even more)
difficult to distinguish between the effectiveness of
the application (the digital dossier) and the usefullness
of the agent (providing guidance in using the dossier).
And, as it comes to testing task-related issues,
we must face the fact that there is only a limited number of
experts that have sufficient knowledge to use the dossier
in an effective way, for example in preparing an installation of
the work of art, in a museum or exhibition gallery.
So, for testing the metamorph box with a sufficient
number of users, we should restrict ourselves to
explorative, or otherwise limited, tasks.
As concerns the design of the agent character,
it is not entirely clear what
design rules we should apply to make an effective and focussed
choice between the personality characteristics represented
by the MetaMorph box.
Any combination of appearance, gestures and speech
characteristics will likely involve multiple factors in the
PEFiC model.
Given the complexity of digital dossiers, we should moreover
identify parts of the dossier, related to specific
subtasks, as for example viewing the video-recorded interview
to find particular items of information, for which we can
control the guidance offered by the agent, to allow
for well-focussed experimentation with personality charactistics
related to the task at hand.
As it stands, we believe that the PEFiC model provides
all the necessary ingredients for experimentally evaluating
ECA systems, provided that we develop a small consistent
set of design parameters for digital dossiers
allowing for controlled experimentation in the given task domain.
suggestions 22/3/2004
[alternative title:]
Agent-enhanced digital dossiers --
an experimental framework for validating agent characteristics
abstract
[after antropomorpic software]:
For the experimental validation of our theory, we
designed a framework for agent-applications in the domain
of cultural heritage.
In this paper, we will introduce the notion of digital dossiers
that contain the information for works of art of a particular
contemporary artist, including video-recorded interviews with the artist.
For such digital dossiers, we will investigate the effectiveness of guidance offered
by agents, the characteristics of which may be varied accross
the parameters distinguished in the PEFiC model.
For the realization of the framework we will use the
DLP/STEP platform, which support agent applications in rich-media
3D environments.
An experimental framework for testing the metamorph box
We proceed from the assumptions that our agents function
primarily as guidance in complex interaction tasks
with some information system, although conversational agents
can take different functions as well, such as for example
a conversational partner in language learning, or as a demonstrator
in learnign a skill.
In interaction tasks in complex environments we can distinguish
between two
paradigms of interaction, namely pure navigation
and guided tours or presentations that are based
on some narrative structure.
Both paradigms can be augmented using embodied
conversational agents, which in the case of navigation
might merely give directions and, in the case of guided tours,
may explain what is going on, possibly offering the user
a choice of continuations.
In cooperation with the Faculty of Social Sciences, we have submitted
a research funding proposal to undertake such evaluation studies,
based on the PEFiC theory outlined previously.
In this proposal [VUBIS], we focused in particular on the relation between
the type of agent (character)
and the material presented (context),
to determine how this relation affects the valence of the
user towards the agent, resulting in the degree of distance or involvement
experienced.
validation scenario(s)
- navigation -- pure interactivity
- guided tours -- using some narrative structure
- agent-mediated -- navigation and guided tours
In this section we will introduce the notion of
digital dossier, which is to be understood as
a collection of information that may be viewed from
different perspectives, and essentially contains,
apart from textual information, rich media information
in the form of video-recorded interviews, audio and images.
This notion of digital dossiers is deployed in
a project done in cooperation with
the Dutch Cultural Heritage Institute
(ICN)
in the context of
the International Network for the Conservation of
Contemporary Art
(INCCA).
Briefly, the idea is to develop digital dossiers
for individual artworks, allowing professionals
to deal with the information involved in an integrated,
highly interactive fashion.
The following project assignment may serve as a characterization of the
notion of digital dossier:
digital dossier
Create a VR that realizes a digital dossier for a work of a particular artist. A digital dossier represents the information that is available for a particular work of art, or a collection of works, of a particular artist. The digital dossier should be multimedia-enhanced, that is include photographs, audio and other multimedia material in a compelling manner.
Note that dossier is an existing english word,
which according to the
Webster New World Dictionary has the following meaning
- dossier (dos-si-er) [Fr < dos (back); so named because labeled on the back] a collection of documents concerning a particular person or matter
It is closely related to the notion of archive, but there
is a different focus:
- archive [...] 1) a place where public records are kept ... 2) the records, material itself ...
Although there are many possible ways to realize a digital dossier,
we have in one case study, centered around the Dutch artist
Marinus Boezem, chosen for deplaying a spatial metaphor
for giving access to the information, namely the artists' atelier.
The artworks, as well as the information about the artworks
is present in the atelier, and in addition in one corner of the
atelier there is a projector with which a video recording of interview
with the artist may be showed.
The artist himself, in the form of a humanoid avatar, is available
as an agent, waiting in the corner of the atelier,
to answer questions about his work.
An initial application of an artist dossier has been developed
in multimedia casus
practicum at the VU, as shown in the screenshots in figure ...
In the actual evaluation studies,
we must, in general, investigate what role embodied agents may play
in presenting such digital dossiers to the user,
and how the agents should appear, that is what services
are offered and what the actual presence of the character
must be.
More specifically, to validate the PEFiC theory, we may vary the
personality characteristics of the agent, possibly
along the perspective of interest for a particular user.
However, there are a number of pitfalls in such evaluation studies,
as for example the structured variation of personality
characteristics over the 64 different types distinguished
in the PEFiC model and, as is the case in many agent applications,
determining the effectiveness of the agents' contribution
in relation to the information provided by the application.
We will discuss these issues in more detail after giving
a brief description of the platform on which we will realize
the experimental framework.
The DLP/STEP agent platform
In a number of papers,
[zie refs ECA Perspectives],
including the paper ECA Perspectives presented at the
Dagstuhl Seminar on Evaluating Embodied Conversational Agents
we have described the DLP+X3D platform and the STEP scripting
language for animating humanoid characters,
as well as a number of applications that have served
as target demonstrators in developing the platform.
The design of the DLP/STEP platform was, among others, motivated by
the requirements listed below.
scripting behavior
- convenience -- for non-professional authors
- compositional semantics -- combining operations
- re-definability -- for high-level specification of actions
- parametrization -- for the adaptation of actions
- interaction -- with a (virtual) environment
These requirements make DLP/STEP specially suitable
for the development of reusable libraries of gestures,
that may be adapted to different personal styles,
with respect to expressiveness and moods.
As indicated in the Dagstuhl paper, for dealing with
streaming media and high performance graphics, a number
of improvements are necessary to the DLP/STEP platform,
that we will, however, not discuss here any further.
Issues and pitfalls in evaluating agent characteristics
As already indicated there are a number of issues and possible
pitfalls in evaluating agent characteristics
and determining the effectiveness of the agent
as distinct from the effectiveness of the application.
A number of these issues has been identified in the
abovementioned Dagstuhl seminar on evaluating embodied
conversational agents.
For our application or rather experimentation platform
we need to factor out appropriate clusters of
character traits and adapt the agent guiding the user through
a digital dossier, so that the users involvement with
the application can be related to the actual characteristics of
the agent.
...
screenshots
...
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|
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artist atelier
| looking at the interview
| following the artist
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(C)
Æliens
2014