The VirBot: a virtual reality robot driven with multimodal commands

✍ Scribed by Jesus Savage-Carmona; Mark Billinghurst; Alistair Holden

• Book ID: 104361335
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 473 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0957-4174
• DOI: 10.1016/s0957-4174(98)00037-2

✦ Synopsis

In this paper we show how symbolic Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques can be used to develop intelligent Virtual Reality (VR) environments. We have developed an expert system architecture for building intelligent agents that respond to voice and gesture commands in virtual environments. To demonstrate the utility of this we present a simple application that allows a user to drive a virtual robot (the VirBot) around a virtual environment with multimodal commands. This software agent is able to accept spoken commands from the user, interpret them using natural language understanding and interact with and modify the virtual environment. Command recognition is further improved by the use of contextual information which reduces recognition error rates by 31%. Context is encoded using scripts, making it easy to compose inferences about events for which there is incomplete or fuzzy information.