Studies of realism and naturalness in a multimodal conversational interface

As computing becomes ever more pervasive in everyday life, new interface metaphors are urgently required. In this thesis, we consider the issues of realism, naturalness, types of interaction, gestures and emotional expression in virtual 'talking head' characters. This thesis presents findings relevant to the design of anthropomorphic interfaces and issues pertaining to the field of anthropomorphic interfaces are discussed. Experimental results on the on levels of interaction, levels of abstraction, gestures and emotions are presented. The applications to study these areas were a web browsing assistant, a storytelling agent, a lecturer agent and a football commentator agent. We are able to ascertain that partial interaction is a valid method for evaluating user's assumptions of on-screen characters, this finding is used extensively in this thesis to design the experiments and greatly facilitates future research. Our conclusions and Gndings provide a solid basis for researchers wanting to carry out further research on these area or developers designing anthropomorphic interfaces.