This paper presents our ongoing work in developing virtual autonomous agents to facilitate human computer interaction, and in particular, perceptual user interfaces (PUIs) for desktop applications based on computer vision techniques. The desktop environment sufficiently constrains the computer vision problem in order to allow robust real-time performance for our agents. Currently the computer vision module is able to detect and track faces in real-time, and broadcast their positions to autonomous software agents. We are using a synthetic face to visualize the behaviors of the autonomous agent, which are very simple so far, and to give the user graphic feedback of the agent’s status. Basically the agent detects the presence of the user by showing a happy face expression, tracks the user’s face, becomes sad once the user is gone, and angry if s/he is gone for a long time. Extensions to the vision module to track facial features and recognize facial expressions, as well as extensions to the agent’s behaviors, are being implemented.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Morimoto:WAICV00,
title = {Virtual autonomous agents with vision},
author = {Carlos H. Morimoto},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision},
series = {I WAICV},
year = {2000}
}