Seamless Guidance by Personal Agent in Virtual Space Based on User Interaction in Real World

This paper describes a personal agent that guides a visitor through a virtual space by using context, i.e., visitor interaction, in the real world. aContext-awareo guidance in the real world has become an increasingly important research demand since the advent of small and powerful palmtop computers, or PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), that can obtain useful information about objects in the real world based on context (e.g., current location and visit history) in the real world. We have tried to extend this context-aware guidance into a virtual environment by using context not from the virtual environment but from the real world; such seamless guidance allows visitors to concentrate their attention on the understanding of actual elements. This paper reports our experiment on seamless guidance by a personal agent in a virtual ancient village using real-world context. This was presented at an open house exhibition in our research laboratories.