RoboThespian, the original robot actor

http://www.robothespian.co.uk/

Be great to get one of these hooked up to an SL avatar!

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Coca Cola Avatars in the real world

Great Super-Bowl ad from Coca-Cola

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Just posted a new video of our Halo robotar in SL

I've just posted a new video to the Daden YouTube channel showing our Halo automated avatar being put through her paces. This is a recording of the demo we gave at the BCS AI Special Interest Group conference in December, and includes a demo of the emotion work we have been doing with the University of Wolverhampton.

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Arduino Open-Source Micro-controller

http://www.arduino.cc/

Neat little open source micro-controller for robotics and electronic arts projects. Keep wondering how you could hook Halo up to some external robotic device so as to give her a presence in the atom world in the same way that our avatars give us a presence in the digital world. What would you call such a thing? Is it still an avatar?

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Adding Features to Halo

Good day working on Halo. Amazingly quiet - the pre-Christmas lull I hope. New features added included:

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James Wagner Au talks to Abi

James Wagner Au (aka Hamlet Au) bumped into our Abi chatbot when visiting our sim recently and wrote a lovely piece about her in New World Notes.

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SL Bot Day - better movement, plus IM and Friend handling

Spent the day working on our ChatbotIF interface to Second Life for a change. This sits between our Discourse chatbot engine and libsecondlife. Worked my way through a list of things we'd flagged up over the past few weeks. Improvements/new features include:

- better point to point movement by estimating travel time for each segment
- full IM handling, including routing IM via Discourse and setting the bot to decline IMs
- full friend handling, including setting the bot to decline Friend requests
- a "fidget" function when idle to play random  animations and movements
- ability to set whether to ignore or listen to objects on channel 0
- ability to control movement from Discourse so the bot can more easily show people around
- accept teleport lure's form owner

Always more to do though!

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YouTube - Hands Free 3D: Second Life Navigation Demo

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Nice video from Mitch Kapoor looking using 3D imaging to control avatars - just the answer to what I was talking about to someone the other day about how we will interact with virtual worlds in the future

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Cyber Extruder

Cyber Extruder generates a face image for avatars like those in SL from a normal 2D photo of your face. Time to build my "real" self in SL!

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Avatars will soon outnumber humans

Victor Keegan: Avatars will soon outnumber humans | Technology | The Guardian

Nice one!

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ComBOTS

ComBOTS

Quite nice take on the desktop avatar idea. Now if only one of those was an AI....

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News at Seven

Software generates video news bulletins - tech - 24 October 2006 - New Scientist Tech

Dynamic news from RSS feeds delivered by avatar. Nice.

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CodeBaby

CodeBaby - hello human are the latest runners in the virtual agent stakes. Pity that it needs a 1MB download and doesn't work with Firefox. I'll have to fire up IE and take a look.

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Virtual Newscasters For Hire

Over at Advanced Chatbot Solutions we've just luanched our NewsBot service. It takes an RSS, RDF or ATOM feed and has it read out as speech by one of the SitePal avatars. Check out the Press Release or visit the demo site.

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ReaderBot Beta

As part of the build up to the launch of ReaderBot in July we've put it onto this site as part of the beta test programme. Essentially it lets blind users hear a web site without having to install any specific software. Later versions will allow the site to be delivered as speech over the telephone. Give it a try and let us know what you think at info@chatbots.co.uk.

Note: Internet Explorer users will need to press ENTER after pressing ALT-R.

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Chatterbox Challenge 2005 Underway

The Chatterbox Challenge is underway again. Public votnig lasts until 30 April so please visit them and vote for Halo.

Read the full press release that we've put out on behalf of Chatterbox Challenge.

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Haptek People Putty

Haptek make Poeple Putty, a nice avatar creation tool. You'll need their player to see them though.

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Talking(!) To Halo

OK, I have to blog this. Spent the last half-hour actually talking to my chatbot having installed Dragon Naturally Speaking on my PC. Weird experience. Only problem was that NS was trying to use Halo's words as input, so I had to put a headset on, but otherwise worked fine. Have to say "click say" after each line to enter it, but I can live with that. Interestingly if the errors in the dictation were not crucial then Halo handled them very well and her responses flowed well. Since one of the end-games for this is for those with sight impairment I tried it for a while with my eyes closed. It immediately highlighted the need for some extra commands such as "what did I say" and "say again", since there are only the sound clues to go on. It needs a lot more work but at least the principle is proven.

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Virtual Worlds

Two or three years ago I spent a lot of time in Alpha World - a 3D virtual environment, where you could build your own houses and landscapes and chat to other visitors. AW is now out of favour and for the last year or so the focus has been on There.com. This had nice chat bubbles, and gave you the ability to buy clothes and equipment in game, and even drive cars and ride hover boards - but didn't let you build much. There.com's finances have been a bit wobbly of late, and were only saved by a big contract for the US Army (!) - but it looks like the consumer portal may now take a back seat to the corporate users.

Which brings us to the newest virtual world - Second Life. Second Life combines the best of Alpha World and There.com, and then adds a whole lot more. You can chat, build, construct vehicles, write programming scripts to control objects, use XML to get data in and out of the world, customise your avatar, and even wage war.

Unlike on-line role playing games where you have tasks (like waging war) these VR environments are totally open ended. You do what you want to do, chat, play games, tour around, build. Second Life is a very sophisticated application, and Second Lifer's are doing some amazing stuff ( I've so far only built a rocket that won't fly, and a plank of wood that flys like Neville's broomstick from Harry Potter!).

Rather than write reams about these 3 places now, I'm going to pull a white paper together and put it up on the Daden site. I'm also looking at how I can give my Halo chatbot a presence in the world.

So if you want to get hold of me in the evenings, look out for me as Corro Moseley in Second Life - probably on the virtual snow slopes.

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AIs being proposed as Astronauts

Virtual Humans Proposed As Space Travelers - well it was at the Telluride Tech Fest.

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