Agents for navigating virtual reality E-commerce environments

We report about work in progress on capabilities of navigation agents in virtual environments. These agents may help a user to explore the environment: where to go, where to buy, where to find, etc. The agents may make suggestions based on a user profile, earlier visits and earlier given advice and these agents may exchange information with other types of agents that may be useful for the visitor or the environment or for the owner of the environment. In our case the environment consists of a multi-purpose theatre building where visitors can get information about performances, but also can make reservations for these performances (buy tickets). Environments like these can be viewed from different perspectives, e.g., an e-commerce perspective (an electronic shop), a community perspective (a market and performance place) where people can meet each other, or an edutainment perspective (people can learn about professional activities that take place, e.g., learning to play an instrument, take part in a performance, design a choreography, etc.). Here we concentrate on navigation in these virtual environments. How can we assist the user in finding its way in such complex and information rich environments? Presently we maintain different subprojects in which navigation aspects of virtual environments are studied. Common characteristics of these subprojects are the use of embodied conversational agents and multimodal interaction between users and embodied agents.