Making interactive personal guides more attractive

We investigate the different roads that should be taken to make 2D and 3D guides on webpages and in (augmented) virtual reality environments more attractive. Currently, most of the approaches have been done from a graphics point of view. Often research stops when we have to model how these graphically well-designed agents are going to do something useful and have to interact with the user or a visitor of an environment. What does the virtual guide know about the environment, what are its goals and how does it recognize and handle the characteristics and desires of the users/vistors it has to deal with? We survey the different approaches we take and mention some shortcomings and how they can be overcome. Topics that will be mentioned are multimodal and affective interaction, social relationships, the role of humor in interactions, web-based applications, and verbal and nonverbal communication modeling.