Jacob: An Educational Agent in a Virtual Environment

The Jacob Project involves the construction of a virtual environment where an animated human-like agent called Jacob gives instruction to the user. The project focuses on three issues: the software engineering aspects of building a virtual reality system, the integration of natural language interaction and other interaction modalities, and the use of agent technology. Jacob has been given a task model and an instruction model in order to teach a particular task. The results of the project can be generalized so that the agent can be used to instruct other tasks in other virtual environments.