Objective
NICE (Natural Interactive Communication for Edutainment) aims to demonstrate universal natural interactive access, in particular for children and adolescents, by developing natural, fun and experientially rich communication between humans and embodied historical and literary characters. The communication will consist of domain-oriented spoken conversation combined with 2D input gesture into a 3D dynamic graphics virtual world inhabited by the fairy-tale author H. C. Andersen and animated characters from his fairy-tale universe. For the first time, professional computer games technologies will be joined with advanced spoken interaction, and speech recognition technology will be specially developed for recognising the speech and spoken linguistic behaviour of children and adolescents. The outcome of NICE will be systems in two different languages demonstrating entertaining and educative immerse multi sensorial interaction as well as easy portability to new languages and applications.
Work description:
NICE (Natural Interactive Communication for Edutainment) aims to demonstrate universal natural interactive access, in particular for children and adolescents, by developing natural, fun and experientially rich communication between humans and embodied historical and literary characters. The communication will consist of domain-oriented spoken conversation combined with 2D input gesture into a 3D dynamic graphics virtual world inhabited by the fairy-tale author H. C. Andersen and animated characters from his fairy-tale universe. For the first time, professional computer games technologies will be joined with advanced spoken interaction, and speech recognition technology will be specially developed for recognising the speech and spoken linguistic behaviour of children and adolescents. The outcome of NICE will be systems in two different languages demonstrating entertaining and educative immerse multi sensorial interaction as well as easy portability to new languages and applications.
The NICE consortium expects to attain the following innovative results:
high-recognition-rate, robust and entertaining conversation with children, adolescents and adults;
high-interaction-success domain-oriented spoken conversation;
a knowledge representation formalism for encoding complex facts about the domain and personality traits and mental states of virtual characters;
naturally communicating and acting interface agents in games industry-quality graphics;
new dialogue management methods for high-complexity multimode edutainment applications;
new methods for multimode input interpretation;
a framework for rapidly specifying virtual worlds inhabited by embodied characters;
portable and re-usable system architecture and components in the field;
new evaluation methods and coding schemes for natural human-system interaction.
Milestones:
The 3-year project NICE (Natural Interactive Communication for Edutainment) will develop two systems in different languages which are optimised for children and adolescents to engage in natural, fun and experientially rich communication with embodied literary characters. The communication consists of domain-oriented spoken conversation and 2D input gesture into a 3D dynamic graphics virtual world inhabited by the fairy-tale author H. C. Andersen and animated characters from his fairy-tale world.
Funding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
5230 Odense M
Denmark
Participants (5)
91196 Gif-sur-yvette Cedex
116 35 Stockholm
52072 Aachen
9820 Merelbeke
10663 Stockholm
