１．担当ＰＭ

　 Ａｌａｎ　ｋａｙ （President, Viewpoints Research Institute）

２．採択者氏名

３．プロジェクト管理組織

　 有限会社アカデミア

４．委託金支払額

　 8,348,527 円

５．テーマ名

　 Cyber Assistant: Interface for Online Children Education

６．関連Webサイト

　なし

７．テーマ概要

　This project is an implementation of an interface for online children education. The project includes several main functions including an online character agent, which reacts to children’s feelings and actions by associating children’s non-verbal information such as emotions. Second, the project includes a guide system "Cyber Guide Dog interface" to give children graphical information of instructions to make them operate well in the education environment. The information obtained from eye-tracking can help to get the information of the user’s attention. Besides the physiological signals, the animated text is also be used to provide a visual interface. The idea of this project is built on past projects on online communication using animation and physiological sensors (the Exploratory Software Project 2003). Using the research carried out in this project, online education for children can become a more comfortable process.

８．採択理由

　　This is an excellent collection of ideas (perhaps too many for one proposal). I suggest concentrating on the CyberDog part of the proposal and perhaps try to use both eye motion and pupil dilation (which indicates interest and boredom) as inputs to help the CyperTutor to take more appropriate actions.

９．進捗概要

　This is a very ambitious large scale and long range project, of which we funded just one part. Both the problem, the goal and the means have been central issues for many years. This investigator is making very good progress on a very difficult problem.

１０．成果

　It is now possible to get reliable real-time eye-tracking records that can be used to guide user interactions, particularly with regard to trying to understand the user's motivation, degree of interest, and boredom. One of the novel and good ideas in this system is to use two agents as a way to defuse the difficulties of single agent interaction with a human user. I thought this was quite effective and deserves more work.

１１．プロジェクト評価

　This investigator was very impressive, well organized and had a very good sense of what needed to be done.

１２．今後の課題

　This is an extremely important research area - because many areas of human computer interaction could benefit from it -- and should receive continued funding.