Commerce and Entertainment in the Twente Virtual Theatre Environment

In this paper we discuss research on a virtual theatre environment. The theatre has been built using VRML and therefore it can be accessed through World Wide Web. In the environment we employ several agents. The theatre allows navigation input through keyboard function keys and mouse, but there is also a navigation agent which tries to understand keyboard natural language input and spoken commands. Feedback of the system is given using speech synthesis. We also have Karen, an information agent which allows a natural language dialogue with the user with the help of, among others, text-tospeech synthesis and a talking face. We discuss how this particular environment can be seen as an environment for commerce and entertainment and we discuss further requirements that should be fulfilled by our agents in order to obtain a ‘believable’ environment.