Avatar-augmented online conversation
Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson, Justine Cassell · 2003
One of the most important roles played by technology is connecting people and mediating their communication with one another. Building technology that mediates conversation presents a number of challenging research and design questions. Apart from the fundamental issue of what exactly gets mediated, two of the more crucial questions are how the person being mediated interacts with the mediating layer and how the receiving person experiences the mediation. This thesis is concerned with both of these questions and proposes a theoretical framework of mediated conversation by means of automated avatars. This new approach relies on a model of face-to-face conversation, and derives an architecture for implementing these features through automation. First the thesis describes the process of face-to-face conversation and what nonverbal behaviors contribute to its success. It then presents a theoretical framework that explains how a text message can be automatically analyzed in terms of its communicative function based on discourse context, and how behaviors, shown to support those same functions in face-toface conversation, can then be automatically performed by a graphical avatar in synchrony with the message delivery. An architecture, Spark, built on this framework demonstrates the approach in an actual