On 14th June, Xinyu Huang and Prof. Dr. Fridolin Wild contributed to the 1st international workshop on Multimodal Artificial Intelligence in Education (part of AIED’21) with a comparative analysis across nine intelligent, holographic agents, extracting common design dimensions into a new framework. “Holographic AI”, so Huang & Wild (2021) have an “anthropomorphic user interface, projected into the real world, which interacts with and responds to both its physical and virtual surroundings”.
The comparative analysis of the nine distinct agents who can interact with both physical and virtual surroundings found that they fall into four distinct groups: non-player game characters, chatbot agents, simulation agents, and intelligent tutors. With respect to their features and affordances, the proposed framework differentiates appearance, behaviour, intelligence, and responsiveness as the main characteristics – ‘design dimensions’. Huang and Wild express preliminary recommendations for developers of Holographic AIs: the use case determines appearance; dialogue management is key; awareness and adaptation are equally important for successful personalisation; and environmental responsiveness to events both in the virtual and digital ream is needed for a seamless experience.