Computers are becoming an ever increasing part of our daily lives both at work and at home. This has led researchers to investigate humanised interfaces as an attempt to provide naive users access to information technology. A natural aspect of humanised interfaces is the incorporation of anthropomorphised entities that can act as agents (personae) on behalf of users. Although considerable work has been carried out on many aspects of computer generated personae research tools in this area are scarce and there have been few attempts to approach the concept of an anthropomorphised interface as a whole rather than as a persona addition to standard work packages. This thesis analyses past work and identifies key requirements for future personae interfaces. It then goes on to present a novel approach to producing a unified persona interface that incorporates many of the disparate capabilities of earlier approaches. This novel approach is then tested objectively and subjectively before being used to undertake a series of experiments both on site in the University of Edinburgh and at sites across Europe in order to identify constraints and bounds for personae interfaces. The results from these experiments are statistically analysed and conclusions are drawn that form a kernel set of constraints for persona interaction. A method for automating the application of this kernel set of constraints is provided and an initial foray into intelligent persona dialogue control is presented. Final conclusions from this work are presented and relevant future work is described.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:660359 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Parker, L. M. |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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