Young Merlin: An Embodied Conversational Agent in Virtual Reality

This paper describes a system for embodied conversational agents developed by Inmerssion and one of the applications--Young Merlin: Trial by Fire --built with this system. In the Merlin application, the ECA and a human interact with speech in virtual reality. The goal of this application is to provide engaging VR experiences that build rapport through storytelling and verbal interactions. The agent is fully automated, and his attitude towards the user changes over time depending on the interaction. The conversational system was built through a declarative approach that supports animations, markup language, and gesture recognition. Future versions of Merlin will implement multi-character dialogs, additional actions, and extended interaction time.