PhD RESEARCH

For my PhD, I am researching on a multi-modal interface for the implementation of an Affective Virtual Tour Guide. The Affective Guide is a context aware system where there are two chatty, emotional and persuasive intelligent virtual guides each possessing contrasting personality. Each guide tells stories from different perspectives based on its role and the user's interest.

The main aim is to enhance tourist experience during a visit where the virtual agent will entertain visitors as well as provide educational and engaging location-related information. The system is intended to be proactive, interactive and provide personalized stories about events or places of attraction.

Focus of the research will be on natural interactivity, augmented reality and multi-sensory system. Augmentation is in terms of text and audio. The user will be giving feedback to the guide through a graphical user interface and receiving output by means on text, audio and visual animation. The Emergent Emotion Model and the Intelligent Storytelling System form the heart of the Affective Guide, where, action selection mechanism, context-aware presentation algorithm, personalization as well as adaptation of presentation and information dissemination based on temporal and spatial conditions will be explored. The emotional model for the guide agent is will be based on the PSI Theory.

Besides that, a tracking system, GPS is applied to track user's position and generate user’s orientation to ensure appropriate information is presented to the user. The guide resides on a PDA and communicates with a server through wireless communication.

Interesting information about this kind of applications can be found in the web pages listed below.

Personal Experience with Active Cultural Heritage Project (PEACH)

HIPS- Hyper-Interaction within Physical Space

Geist project (In German)

A copy of my thesis can be found here.