Development of Virtual Humans - Early Years

I think, its a good idea to start this post, with a simple, non-technical definition for a virtual human. A virtual human is an intelligent system capable of providing and accepting information through a full-range of human modalities (e.g., speech,gesture, face expressions, etc).

Constructing an intelligent VH with a general intelligence is a scary idea that should never be pursued. Instead I am more fun of the the robot-slaves idea, i.e., virtual humans (in physical or holographic form) that ONLY look intelligent in a specific domain (e.g., tour-guides, sales, etc)

I initially started working with VH back in 2002, during my Master's degree. The demo I constructed, the e-briefing room is shown below, along with a brief description of its functionality:

The “e-Briefing Room” service provides a tool for effectively educate customers with complex and high-end products on the Web. This vehicle allow customers to fully interact with three-dimensional (3D) models of products online, and also access personalized services on demand, which will be provided by a three-dimensional (3D) talking virtual sales-assistant.Through this interactive technology, the e-briefing room makes it easy for customers to access information on demand. Start your experience by directly selecting a product category of your choice, or activate Derek to listen a detail presentation about the functionalities of the service.

The demo was extremely simple (but... I did it only for my Master's degree). Its only difference from a static web-page, was the 3D head (from an Australian company called famous3D). Back in those days I wasn't even aware of the existence of ALICE But once you got the bug of VH technology you can not easily stop. The simple "e-briefing room" was enough to start me wondering what could be next in the exciting world of Virtual Humans.

In 2003 I was given the opportunity to study for an M.Phil degree at Middlesex University in London. My decision was to continue working on Virtual Humans for electronic commerce.