Institute for Creative Technologies

We present an overview of the workshop on Common Sense Knowledge and Goal-Oriented Interfaces held at the 2008 Intelligent User Interfaces conference. Six papers were accepted from diverse research groups, each offering innovative new research on interfaces that incorporate common sense knowledge and that are oriented around the goals of their users.

We tested a life-size embodied question-answering character at a convention where he responded to questions from the audience. The character’s responses were then rated for coherence. The ratings, combined with speech transcripts, speech recognition results and the character’s responses, allowed us to identify where the character needs to improve, namely in speech recognition and providing off-topic responses.

The idea of Virtual Reality once conjured up visions of new territories to explore, and expectations of awaiting worlds of wonder. VR has matured to become a practical tool for therapy, medicine and commercial interests, yet artists, in particular, continue to expand the possibilities for the medium. Artistic virtual environments created over the past two decades probe the phenomenological nature of these virtual environments. When we inhabit a fully immersive virtual environment, we have entered into a new form of Being. Not only does our body continue to exist in the real, physical world, we are also embodied within the virtual by means of technology that translates our bodied actions into interactions with the virtual environment. Very few states in human existence allow this bifurcation of our Being, where we can exist simultaneously in two spaces at once, with the possible exception of meta-physical states such as shamanistic trance and out-of-body experiences. This paper discusses the nature of this simultaneous Being, how we enter the virtual space, what forms of persona we can don there, what forms of spaces we can inhabit, and what type of wondrous experiences we can both hope for and expect.