Embodied mobile agents
Bill Tomlinson, Man Lok Yau, Eric P. S. Baumer · 2006
The move in many societies toward individuals having multiple networked computational devices -- workstations, notebooks computers, mobile phones, PDAs - radically changes the ways in which people engage those devices. However, we lack interaction paradigms that enable a coherent experience across these technologies. One possible approach to this problem involves the use of embodied mobile agents (EMAs), that is, graphically animated, autonomous or semi-autonomous software systems that can migrate seamlessly from one computational device to another. This paper describes an interactive museum exhibit that was implemented with EMAs, discusses the opportunities and challenges presented by this new form of agent, and consider other potential applications for EMAs. While not a universal solution to challenges of interacting with heterogeneous networks of devices, embodied mobile agents can help to provide a coherent user experience across multiple computational devices.