Embodied agents for multi-party dialogue in immersive virtual worlds

Immersive virtual worlds are increasingly being used for education, training, and entertainment, and virtual humans that can interact with human users in these worlds play many important roles. However, current computational models of dialogue do not address the issues that arise with face-to-face communication situated in three-dimensional worlds, such as the proximity and attentional focus of others, the ability to maintain multi-party conversations, and the interplay between speech and nonverbal signals. This paper presents a new model that integrates and extends prior work on spoken dialogue and embodied conversational agents, and describes an initial implementation that has been applied to training in virtual reality.