Papers about Body motion

Although avatars may resemble communicative interface agents, they have for the most part not profited from recent research into autonomous embodied conversational systems. In particular, even though avatars function within conversational environments (for example, chat or games), and even though they often resemble humans (with a head, hands, and a body) they are incapable of representing the kinds of knowledge that humans have about how to use the body during communication. Humans, however, do make... Read more

Asynchronous, Hierarchical Agents (AHAs) provide a vertically structured multilevel abstraction hierarchy. In this paper, we argue that this multilevel hierarchy is a convenient way to create a human-agent interface at multiple levels of abstraction. In this way, the agent has several layers of specication (input) and visualization (output) which facilitates users with problem solving, because such an interface parallels the hierarchical and iterative nature of human creative thought processes. The AHA interface presents an intuitive,... Read more

A small group of hand gestures made during conversation (interactive gestures) seem to function solely to assist the process of dialogue rather than to convey topical information. The rate of interactive gestures was significantly higher when 27 dyads talked in dialogue than in sequential monologues, whereas the rate of other (topical) gestures did not change; this difference supports the theory that interactive gestures are uniquely affected by the requirements of dialogue. A second, microanalytic study... Read more