Engaging in a Conversation with Synthetic Characters Along the Virtuality Continuum

During the last decade research groups as well as a number of commercial software developers have started to deploy embodied conversational characters in the user interface especially in those application areas where a close emulation of multimodal human-human communication is needed. Most of these characters have one thing in common: In order to enter the user’s physical world, they need to be physical themselves. The paper focuses on challenges that arise when embedding synthetic conversational agents in the user’s physical world. We will start from work on synthetic agents that populate virtual worlds and anthropomorphic robots that inhabit physical worlds and discuss how the two areas need to be combined in order to populate physical worlds with synthetic characters. Finally, we will report on so-called traversable interfaces that allow agents to cross the border from the physical space to the virtual space and vice versa.