The Knowbotic Interface Project - Phase 2
First Encounter !
© INM Institut fuer Neue Medien 1996
What's it all about.
Well, if you have gotten this far you will at least know that we are trying to
develop an agent wich is able to learn speach. This is our second step in this
direction and the Knowbotic Interface is still under construction.
To prove our theory, we had to design a world for the agent in wich it lives.
It is able to see, hear, smell and feel, just like you and me do (well allmost).
And like we do, it has certain basic attitudes and needs.
To enable the agent to learn, we had to equip it with the ability to perceive
its environment and evaluate that information. At this state of progress we are
not able to visualize these internal processes. We demonstrate them through the
behavior of the agent towards the user and its response to user actions:
One of its attitudes is that it is very shy. And it likes to go for a walk in
its world. So if you drop the knowbot (that's what we call our agent) into the
world it will immediately start to walk around. By doing so it will get thirsty
and walk to one of the springs wich are spread around the world and will stop
there to drink some water.
You can get into this world, too, and like the knowbot you can also walk around
and take a look at the world. But as soon as the knowbot will sense you near it,
it will try to run away.
Your task is to make the knowbot used to your presence near him and later maybe
you will be able to make the knowbot follow you around in the world.
How to use the Knowbotic Interface.
When you have loaded all the graphics the knowbotic interface will start running.
You will see two windows, one is a view into the world and the other one is your
command window wich is used for special commands.
You can move the view over the world by moving the mouse pointer to one of the
four edges of the view and pressing the mouse button. The view will continue scrolling
until you release the button again or the end of the world is reached.
The pseudo knowbot is your body (avatar) in the world. If you have found a spot
in the world you like you can drop the pseudo knowbot into the world. To do so
you have to click on the 'drop pseudo' button in the command
window and then click on a free space in the graphic view (one of the sand like
places). The pseudo knowbot will appear at this place.
Now, if you want to walk around you just click the 'walk button'
and click on the target area in the view and off you go. Be carefull because the
'walk button' stays active until you click on the 'stop
button'. If you want to stop the pseudo knowbot just click on 'stop'.
If you click 'show map' a little map window will appear. It shows
the entire world from above. There, the red blip marks the pseudo-knowbot which
you are controlling and the yellow blip marks the knowbot. Everything else are
all kinds of objects.
The green square shows the location of your world-view-window. If you click
into the map-view, then will the world view be located at this position.
After you have brought your body into the world you can drop the knowbot in the
same way you droped the pseudo knowbot (the option to drop the knowbot is active
as soon as you have dropped the pseudo knowbot into the world). When you are near
the knowbot you can use the 'talk button' to talk gently to the
knowbot or you can use the 'shout button' to shout at the knowbot.
As you soon will see, this has quite interesting effects on the behavior of the
knowbot.
If you want to start playing with the knowbot from scratch you can easyly remove
the knowbot by clicking on the 'remove knowbot' button.
Okay thats it, have fun!
Credits:
Programming: Leonhard Pos and Thore Swindall.
Idea and Concept: Dr. Gerd Doeben-Henisch.
Special thanks to Nico and Bernhard from the INM 3D-Department for the cute graphics.
:-)
Thanks to the INM-people for moral and technical support.