Is that a parrot on your shoulder?

COMRIS

Walther Van de velde
Starlab
wvdv@starlab.net

The COMRIS project is developing an infrastructure to support social processes in dynamic communities, for instance at large conferences (like IST 2000, which we hope to use for a large-scale demonstration). The most visible part of the project, and by now also its hallmark, is the COMRIS parrot — a wearable device that offers its ‘user’ (or should we say ‘keeper’?) hints and advice on points of interest at a conference or fair.

The COMRIS parrot came to life roughly halfway through the project. Our reviewers in Nyborg drew attention to the risk involved in developing our own hardware, and indeed it took a little longer than we thought; but the experience gained in the process, and the need to reflect on every technical and functional decision, have proven to be very valuable. The parrot is based on a StrongARM processor: squeezed in a two-layer sandwich construction are two PCMCIA slots and all the other components normally found in a powerful state-of-the-art laptop. The wallet-sized pack runs LINUX, from which a Local Area Network is accessed wirelessly and interface peripherals are addressed, in particular for speech and simple screen interactions. The ‘eyes’ for context perception are no more than a bunch of infrareds to identify places and locate other parrots. Apart from this, the parrot is essentially an output-only device. Remarkably enough, our first user-studies have revealed that users would like to control the parrot’s behaviour, that is, decide for themselves whether they want to hear a message. This goes against the whole philosophy of the project (you can’t switch off your dog either), but we’ll need to take it into account for the final product design.

Parrot manqué

But COMRIS is more than its parrot. In fact, the COMRIS parrot is a link to a bustling parallel artificial universe of numerous software agents. Our software infrastructure for this has been tested to be scalable, and it is essentially decentralised and reasonably robust. All components around it have been fully integrated, so that we can now run complete interaction scenes at a simulated conference, called RAVE’99, where virtual people attend talks, have drinks in the bar, and discuss interesting topics. Agents acting in the interest of these virtual people (and eventually of you and me) explore the artificial society to find interesting peers, schedule appointments or spot interesting events, and they give their owners personalised messages with appropriate information at appropriate times. We are currently getting ready for the first humble demonstrations in Siena and Helsinki where, we hope, these messages will be spoken by the parrot.

While the COMRIS parrot has come to life it does not know how to speak yet. The text and speech generation components are currently being adapted to the relevant platforms, and we are beginning to experiment with the algorithms for competition for attention (the basic social engine, according to COMRIS). We’re also concentrating on the visual aspects of an artificial society and, eventually, interaction with it (through the parrot) in the CAVE immersive virtual environment. But it will take a few more technical meetings before all this comes together in the co-habited mixed realities that we originally envisaged. In the meantime we’ll content ourselves with virtual participation in RAVE’99.

COMRIS web site: www.riv.be/research/projects/comris-abstract.html