Intelligent Anthropomorphic Interface-Agent System in Networked Environment

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New human interface styles are being pursued recently beyond current GUI (Graphical User Interface). Among them, we have paid our attention to multimodal anthropomorphic interface and have carried out our research. It is an interface style regarding human face-to-face communication as metaphor. In particular, we have emphasized the practical usefulness fitted to emerging WWW information environment in our research.Based on our previous research result on an interface agent system called VSA (Visual Software Agent) with a realistic moving face and voice communication capability, we have connected it to a WWW browser (Netscape Navigator). As a result, it has realized a new multimodal interface-style for the WWW information space containing huge information contents. Not only as an interface but also as a new multimodal information-content form, we have developed a prototype VPA (Visual Page Agent), which is embedded in a Web page and interacts with users through realistic moving facial images and speech dialogs.We got also having an interest in multimodal presentation using CG characters as new attractive information contents and have developed MPML (Mlutimodal Presentation Markup Language), which allows many people to write attractive multimodal presentations easily. As MPML is conformed to XML, it is fitted for the distribution in the WWW. MPML and its related tools are now practical level and available as public software.