The purpose of visual attentive presentation agents is to exploit users’ natural expressions of visual interest in the presented material, which can be detected by analyzing their eye gaze patterns, and have life-like virtual presenters adapt their presentation accordingly.

The video clip is GALA Award Winner 2006 in the category "Lifelike Agent Application". The GALA (Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents) 2006 Festival was held in conj. with the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA).

Detailed information is available at the Visual Attentive Presentation Agents Website.

MPML3D is our first candidate of the next generation of authoring languages aimed at supporting digital content creators in providing highly appealing and highly interactive content with little effort. The language is based on our previously developed family of Multimodal Presentation Markup Languages (MPML) that broadly followed the "sequential" and "parallel" tagging structure scheme for generating pre-synchronized presentations featuring life-like characters and interactions with the user. The new markup language MPML3D deviates from this design framework and proposes a reactive model instead, which is apt to handle interaction-rich scenarios with highly realistic 3D characters. Interaction in previous versions of MPML could be handled only at the cost of considerable scripting effort due to branching. By contrast, MPML3D advocates a reactive model that allows perceptions of other characters or the user interfere with the presentation flow at any time, and thus facilitates natural and unrestricted interaction.

MPML3D is designed as a powerful and flexible language that is easy-to-use by non-experts, but it is also extensible as it allows content creators to add functionality such as a narrative model by using popular scripting languages.

While objects of our focus of attention ("where we are looking at") and accompanying affective responses to those objects is part of our daily experience, little research exists on investigating the relation between attention and positive affective evaluation. The purpose of our research is to process users' emotion and attention in real-time, with the goal of designing systems that may recognize a user's affective response to a particular visually presented stimulus in the presence of other stimuli, and respond accordingly. In this paper, we introduce the AutoSelect system that automatically detects a user's preference based on eye movement data and physiological signals in a two-alternative forced choice task. In an exploratory study involving the selection of neckties, the system could correctly classify subjects' choice in 81%. In this instance of AutoSelect, the gaze 'cascade effect' played a dominant role, whereas pupil size could not be shown as a reliable predictor of preference.

Demo: The video clip (21MB) provides an introduction to the work on automated preference detection. The clip was designed and edited by Arjen Hoekstra.

We have implemented an augmented reality videoconferencing system that inserts virtual graphics overlays into the live video stream of remote conference participants. The virtual objects are manipulated using a novel interaction technique cascading fiducial marker-based bimanual tangible interaction and eye tracking. User studies prove that our user interface enriches remote collaboration by offering hitherto unexplored ways for collaborative object manipula-tion such as gaze controlled raypicking of remote physical and virtual mobile objects.

Demo: István Barakonyi produced this amazing video clip (139MB, XviD codec is needed).

This work advocates a novel method for evaluating the impact of animated interface agents with affective and empathic behavior. While previous studies relied on questionnaires in order to assess the user's overall experience with the interface agent, we will analyze users' physiological response (skin conductance and electromyography), which allows us to estimate affect-related user experiences on a moment-by-moment basis without interfering with the primary interaction task. As an interaction scenario, a card game has been implemented where the user plays against a virtual opponent. We used the Max agent that was developed at the Univ. of Bielefeld.

The findings of our study indicate that within a competitive gaming scenario, (i) the absence of the agent's display of negative emotions is conceived as arousing or stress-inducing, and (ii) the valence of users' emotional response is congruent with the valence of the emotion expressed by the agent. Our results for skin conductance could also be reproduced by assuming a local rather than a global baseline.

Demo: A video clip (16MB) showing the game interaction has been prepared by Christian Becker.