Dialogues for Embodied Agents in Virtual Environments

This paper is a progress report on our research, design, and implementation of a virtual reality environment where users (visitors, customers) can interact with agents that help them to obtain information, to perform certain transactions and to collaborate with them in order to get some tasks done. We consider this environment as a laboratory for doing research and experiments with users interacting with agents in multimodal ways, referring to visualized information and making use of knowledge possessed by domain agents, but also, in the future, by agents that represent other visitors of this environment. As such, we think that our environment can be seen as a laboratory for research on users and user interaction in (electronic) commerce, educational and entertainment environments.