I liked what Ken is doing at Toontalk! I would think that's the way for us to go. Okay, I accept the caveat on Bob, but Microsoft is hardly the company to take lessons from. For instance, I think they reaally screwed up the Office Agent. Someone lese would've come up with a more interesting version, with appropriate changes in the WHOLE interface to suit the Agent's existence. The "slapping on" an Agent strategy doesn't work. This is because the introduction of an animated character changes the whole user experience. I haven't seen Bob, so I can't comment on what happened there. But, in general, animated characters have been introduced to the interface in an ad-hoc manner.
Here's a useful way to think of what happens when we have an animated character in the interface. To support data mining by Web agents, there is an effort on now to make the Web more semantic. (semanticweb.org). This is the exact opposite of the MS Office Agent strategy. I view this as changing the environment to suit the agent. We need the equivalent of this in the interface when we introduce the Animated character. The character should be able to refer to the objects it has around it, point at things, infer about the state of objects, the psychological state of the user etc. For this, the whole interface has to be designed for the character to exist in. The objects need to be tailored for not just the user, but also for the Agent. This is HARD.
I think animated characters change the whole user perspective. I have written a paper on the use of agent interfaces, trying to explore the relationship between Agent Interfaces and Direct manipulation Interfaces. Here's the link:
http://wabakimi.carleton.ca/~schandr2/agents/ui.html
It is a pre-publication version.
Here's a company that makes characters that live on the interface:
Also, check out Agneta and Frida, at SICS:
http://www.sics.se/~annika/antropomorphism/
Sanjay
Ken Kahn wrote:
Hi all.I agree with Sanjay that animated characters are the way to go. I would
primarily look at game technology and only secondarily at the CHI stuff. CHI
tends to be more conservation. And game developers only do things that work
for large audiences including kids. Think about the characters in a game
like Nintendo's Zelda - they help you learn about the world and help you do
things. And kids spends many hours in such games just for the fun of it.
I've been building ToonTalk (www.toontalk.com) which takes game ideas and
applies them to providing a programming system for kids. The kids program
from inside of an animated world using animated characters. The same ideas
should apply at the level of an operating system.But one does need to understand what went wrong with Microsoft Bob. That was
an attempt to provide an "agent" interface to the computer. It has some good
ideas and parts but it failed miserably despite a big marketing effort from
Microsoft.Best,
-ken kahn
-------------------------------------
Sanjay Chandrasekharan,
Ph.D Student (Cognitive Science),
Carleton University,
Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada K1S 5B6
Phone: 520-2600 ext 1568
http://wabakimi.carleton.ca/~schandr2