Digital City Tour Guide

This project builds on previous work by Katherine ISBISTER . Isbister has researched and designed interactive characters, paying special attention to proper role behavior as a strong factor in the success of an agent.

The Tour Guide is designed to successfully communicate information about Kyoto that creates valuable cross-cultural context for foreign visitors. To craft the guide, Isbister has researched the cross-cultural tour guide role by observing the behavior of real human tour guides in Kyoto and elsewhere. She used this information to guide development of the tour guide's capabilities.

This is a picture of the Microsoft Agent character which is used as the Kyoto Digital City Tour Guide.

You can try out the prototype tour, by logging onto our I-chat server. You will need to use Internet Explorer, and download a 3DML plug-in and some Microsoft Agent components, to take the tour. The chat log-on page is here.

Isbister is working with NTT Open Lab members, and students from the Stanford Japan Center in Kyoto, to create a functional prototype of the system.

The team will run character-led web tours of the digital Kyoto prototype, and use the records of these tours to refine the tour guide's abilities.

Isbister will present this research at the 1999 AAAI Fall Symposium on Narrative Intelligence.

team members: Isbister, with extensive technical assistance and programming by Stefan Lisowski of Omron Software and KOBAYASHI Kenji and HIRAMATSU Kaoru of NTT Open Lab, also contributions from students from the Stanford Japan Center in Kyoto.