Time to Go ONLINE! A Modular Framework for Building Internet-based Socially Interactive Agents

Abstract

Although socially interactive agents have emerged as a new metaphor for human-computer interaction, they are, to date, absent from the Internet. We describe the design choices, implementation, and challenges in building EEVA, the first fully integrated platform-independent framework for deploying realistic 3D web-based social agents: with real-time multimodal perception of, and response to, the user's verbal and non-verbal social cues, EEVA agents are capable of communicating rich customizable content to users in real time, while building and maintaining users' profiles for long-term interactions. The modularity of the EEVA framework enables it to be used as a testbed for agents' social communication model development of increasing performance and sophistication (e.g. building rapport, expressing empathy). We discuss the framework's feasibility by analyzing the response time of the system over the Internet, in the context of a health intervention built using EEVA authoring functionalities.