In this contribution, we report on work towards the development of an “Inner Voice” that accompanies and talks to the player while exploring a 3D-game world. We have developed a prototype for experimentation and testing that relies on off-the-shelf LLM-based chatbots from OpenAI [1]. Fundamental to our approach is that both prompts passed to the LLM and the responses received from the LLM are anchored in the game world and the course of gameplay. In a gaming context, using an inner voice opens up various possibilities. Firstly, it can be parameterized with regard to its linguistic realization, including, among other things, message length, language style and tone, word choices, lexical frequency of words, or the use of certain rhetorical figures. Secondly, when triggered by a game world event, the message content can be biased to influence the player’s decision-making. Thirdly, an inner voice can provide clues about a background story. Variations in the background story and the provided clues can condition the player’s interpretation of observed game world events as well as decision-making, which in turn impacts the construction of a self-narrative. We describe our approach to prototype development and discuss experiences and findings made through various trial runs of our prototype.

There is an increasing need for technology that assist people with more effective monitoring and management of their energy generation and consumption. In recent years a considerable number of research activities have resulted in a multitude of new ICT-supported tools and services for both the private energy consumer market, as well as for energy related business and industries (e.g., utility and grid companies, facility management, etc.). This workshop focuses on advanced interaction, interface, and visualization techniques for energy-related applications, tools, and services. It brings together researchers and practitioners from a diverse range of background, including interaction design, human-computer interaction, visualization, computer games, and other fields concerned with the development of advanced visual interfaces for smart energy applications.

In this contribution we argue that power grid design and monitoring is an application domain that could greatly benefit from novel visualization techniques as well as from advances in interactive graphics. To support our point of view we refer to some selected works including an interactive tool for planning grid extensions, and a simulation environment for micro grids.

Navigation support concerning both physical space as well as information spaces address fundamental information needs of mobile users in many application scenarios including the classical shopping visit in the town centre. Therefore it is a particular research objective in the mobile domain to explore, showcase, and test the interplay of physical navigation with navigation in an information space that, metaphorically speaking, superimposes the physical space. We have developed a demonstrator that couples a spatial navigation aid in the form of a 2D interactive map viewer with other information services, such as an interactive web directory service that provides information about shops and restaurants and their product palettes. The research has raised a number of interesting questions, such as of how to align interactions performed in the navigation aid with meaningful actions in a coupled twin application, and vice versa, how to reflect navigation in an information space in the aligned spatial navigation aid.

In this paper we present some results to model complex interactions among virtual characters that participate in negotiation dialogues as well as our work related to a gaze model that controls the eye behavior of several agents conversing with each other. As a test-bed we have created an Avatar Arena in which several avatars negotiate on meeting arrangement tasks on behalf of their users. To enhance the naturalness of the emerging negotiation dialogues we need to determine both the behaviors of speakers as well as the behaviors of listening characters. In our approach we try to exploit socio-physiological concepts, such as cognitive balance and dissonance to determine verbal and nonverbal behavior of all dialogue participants. We pay particular attention to the gaze behavior of the speaker considering the communicative functions the speaker desires to communicate as well as a statistical model of eye movements. In addition, a model of gaze behavior for listeners is also proposed.

During the last years, an increasing number of R&D projects has started to deploy life-like characters for presentation tasks in a diverse range of application areas, including, for example, E-Commerce, E-learning, and help systems. Depending on factors, such as the degree of interactivity and the number of the deployed characters, different architectures have been proposed for system implementation. In this contribution, we first analyse a number of existing user interfaces with presentation characters from an architectural point of view. We then introduce the MIAU platform and illustrate by means of illustrated generation examples how MIAU can be used for the realization of character applications with different conversational settings. Finally, we sketch a number of potential application fields for the MIAU platform

No abstract available.

A promising approach to customize the delivery of multimedia content is based on methods for compiling content packages from repositories of existing media assets, such as text paragraphs and images. Since the authors of media assets may have specified layout preferences for their assets neither knowing in which package these assets eventually will occur, nor knowing the personal layout preferences of all potential customers, layout conflicts, such as incompatible style attributes, are preprogrammed when packages are compiled on the fly by an automated system. In this contribution we present a constraint-based approach for resolving layout conflicts in automatically compiled content packages. Depending on the number and nature of the layout constraints to be considered, many eligible layout styles may exist. In fact, the exploration of a style solution space creates a problem on its own. Therefore, we are also investigating clustering and visualization techniques to assist a system administrator in the exploration of the solution space. The work has been conducted in the context of the EU funded project IMAGEN which aims at the development of an integrated set of tools for the customized publication and distribution of multimedia content.

In this paper we present MapViews, Magic Lounge, and Call-Kiosk, three different but related systems that address the integration of mobile communication terminals into multi-user applications. MapViews is a test-bed to investigate how a small group of geographically dispersed users can jointly solve localization and route planning tasks while being equipped with different communication terminals. Magic Lounge is a virtual meeting space that provides a number of communication support services and allows its users to connect via heterogeneous devices. Finally, we sketch Call-Kiosk a system that is currently being designed for setting up a commercial information service for mobile clients. All three systems emphasize the high demand for automated design approaches which are able to generate information presentations that are tailored to the available presentation capabilities of particular target devices.

In this paper, we investigate a new style for presenting information. We introduce the motion of presentation teams which — rather than addressing the user directly — convey information in the style of performances to be observed by him or her. The paper presents an approach to the automated generation of performances which has been tested in two different application scenarios, car sales dialogues and soccer commentary.

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.

A growing number of research projects both in academia and industries have started to investigate the use of animated agents in the interface. Such agents, either based on real video, cartoon-style drawings or even model-based 3D graphics, are likely to become integral parts of future user interfaces. To be useful, however, interface agents have to be intelligent in the sense that they exhibit a reasonable behavior. In this paper, we present a system that uses a lifelike character, the so-called PPP Persona, to present multimedia material to the user. This material has been either automatically generated or fetched from the web and modified if necessary. The underlying approach is based on our previous work on multimedia presentation planning. This core approach is complemented by additional concepts, namely the temporal coordination of presentation acts and the consideration of the human-factors dimension of the added visual metaphor.

Multiple input devices are increasingly used in user interfaces to make human-computer communication more efficient and effective. Interface designers have not only to decide on which input modes should be supported, but also how to fuse them into a single representation format that can be processed by the underlying application system. Drawing appropriate decisions requires, however, a sufficient understanding of the properties of fusion itself. While others have informally characterized input fusion as a transformation between information types, the purpose of the paper is to explore fusion by means of formal process modelling. That is, fusion processes are defined in a formal framework which supports proof of the existence of necessary properties following directly from the process definitions. The presented approach can be applied to analyse and compare fusion processes in existing systems, as well as an aid for interface designers, who have to verify the behaviour of their systems.