Culture-Specific First Meeting Encounters between Virtual Agents

We present our concept of integrating culture as a computational parameter for modeling multimodal interactions with virtual agents. As culture is a social rather than a psychological notion, its influence is evident in interactions, where cultural patterns of behavior and interpretations mismatch. Nevertheless, taking culture seriously its influence penetrates most layers of agent behavior planning and generation. In this article we concentrate on a first meeting scenario, present our model of an interactive agent system and identify, where cultural parameters play a role. To assess the viability of our approach, we outline an evaluation study that is set up at the moment.