TelMeA: An Asynchronous Community System with Avatar-like Agents

In this paper, we propose an asynchronous community system named TelMeA, which employs avatarlike agents, or scriptable animated agents, as the conversation interface. Few of current online community systems are close to real communities both in reality and in functions. We show with the proposed system that online community can be more like our real community in awareness of participants and of community itself. TelMeA realizes the following functions for asynchronous communication using avatar-like agents: individual embodied presence, physical communicative cues, interpersonal spaces, and cooperative reference. Participants can easily identify other participants with avatar-like agents. And people can understand meanings of other participants’ messages well and become expressive in their messages with non-verbal behaviours of agents. We performed a preliminary psychological experiment to clarify functions of avatar-like agents, and implemented the result in TelMeA. We also evaluated TelMeA by a test use and showed that TelMeA is natural and useful for asynchronous communities.