Jacob Project

Project description

The Jacob project is one of the pilot projects of Virtual Reality Valley Twente, a collaboration of a number of local organisations in order to set up a knowledge centre on virtual reality and its applications.
The Jacob project involves a virtual agent that assists and instructs users in performing tasks in a virtual environment. Currently, the Jacob system is a stand-alone application, but in the future, Jacob will be integrated in the Virtual Music Centre (VMC) to provide instruction and navigation services.

Early document on the requirements and approach

In the Jacob project several concepts from several research areas have been integrated. We use knowledge and results from areas like intelligent tutoring systems, agent animation, interaction with objects in a virtual environment, and multimodal interaction.

The following documents provide information on different aspects of the Jacob system, the underlying problems and the design of the system.

Jacob as instruction agent, a proposal for a first problem domain for Jacob (in Dutch)
Survey of relevant literature and background work
Analysis of the background work (in Dutch)
Related work
List of features
Description of design issues
Example dialogues with Jacob (in Dutch)

Presentations

Avaliable are (in PowerPoint 97 format):

Slides of the short presentation at the 2nd informal VR Valley Twente meeting (2 March 2000)
Slides of the internal 'ParlevinkPraatje' (6 March 2000)

Publications

Marc Evers, Anton Nijholt, Jacob - An animated instruction agent in virtual reality, in: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2000)

Executing Jacob

The Jacob system can be executed from here. This version uses a dialogue system written by Carp Technologies; this dialogue system runs in a client/server configuration. A short explanation of Jacob's user interface is available in Dutch.

To execute the prototype, you need a web browser with Java 1.1 support and a VRML 2.0 browser. I have tested it with Netscape 4.6 / 4.7 and Internet Explorer 4 / 5. Tested VRML 2.0 browsers are CosmoPlayer 2.1.1 and Blaxxun Contact.
Note that the combination of Java and VRML (through the EAI interface) suffers stability problems. Web browsers can crash when refreshing/reloading the prototype.

For those not able to execute the Jacob system, some screenshots are available: Jacob & Towers of Hanoi; more Jacob; Jacob moving a cube
You can also see an AVI movie of Jacob in action.

An older version of the Jacob system without the dialogue system by Carp Technologies (from 21 June 2000) is also available.

Last modified $Date: 2001/01/22 14:11:40 $ by Parlevink Webmaster