Integrating a virtual agent into the real world: The virtual anatomy assistant ritchie

Abstract

Augmented realities, which are partially real and partially virtual, open up new ways for humans to interact with Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) since they allow users to meet ECAs in the physical space. Nevertheless, attempts to integrate ECAs as digital overlays in a physical space have been rare. Obvious reasons are the high demands such an integration puts to the animation of ECAs as virtual augmentations of the physical space, their capabilities to perceive not only the virtual, but also the physical world as well as reactive behavior control. In this paper, we describe our technical contributions towards solving these challenges. To illustrate our ideas, we present the virtual anatomy assistant Ritchie that monitors the user's actions in a physical space and dynamically responds to them. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.