WebPersona: a lifelike presentation agent for the World-Wide Web

Abstract

Rapid growth of competition on the electronic market place, will generate the demand for new innovative communication styles with web users. In this paper, we develop an operational approach for the automated generation of hypermedia presentations. Unlike conventional hypermedia, we use a life-like presentation agent which presents the generated material, and guides the user through a dynamically expanding navigation space. The approach relies on a model that combines behavior planning for life-like characters with concepts from hypermedia authoring such as timeline structures and navigation graphs.

Evaluating an Animated Pedagogical Agent

“…PPP Persona [3] guides the learner through Web-based material by pointing to important elements of Web pages, and providing additional auditory comments. There are five different characters, three of which are video-based, and the remaining two are cartoon characters.…”

“…Finally, the state machine compilation approach composes behaviour out of primitives, but generates a state machine, so that the behaviour of an agent can adapt at run time to student actions. Andre, Rist and Muller [2] describe a presentation planner, which develops a navigation graph from given goals. A navigation graph contains all presentation units with associated durations and transitional information.…”

Dynamic web markup language (DWML) for generating animated web pages with character agent and time-control function

“…), and some presentation agents have been developed for multimodal presentations [2,4,8,9], there are still few systems able to control primary media objects and character agents together with time-control function. DWML is suitable for creating dynamic web pages in which an animated character plays a main role and other multimedia objects such as audio, video and text are synchronized with the behavior of the characters.…”

“…The pitch, speed, volume of voice can be changed, and some words or sentences can be emphasized. Gesture: Occasional gestures make c haracter agents more natural and more attractive [2,3]. To keep character agents' simple to use, we use predened gestures for every character.…”

“…Inspired by the hypermedia model of PPP persona [2,3], we represent information of web pages by a collection of interactive units and dene anchors and links specifying how to get from one unit to another. Due to the fact that DWML documents contain time-based information, the links must unambiguously refer to an associated time point in the destination documents.…”