ECAgents means Embodied Communicating Agents and is a project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program. FAL at Viktoria Institute is a part of this project.

For an agent to be an ECAgents it should be able to interact directly with the physical world and communicate with other agents and humans.

My role as summer intern was to look at the communication between agent and human. Especially to identify qualities in this interaction which humans would find fascinating. The goal was to establish agent features that would interest humans besides classic robot features (i.e. looking like a human).

In order to do this, user studies were performed on owners of rare pets (i.e. snakes, lizards, spiders). By investigating why some people are interested in pets that cannot be cuddled with, qualities were identified which later in the ECAgents project can be transferred to agents.

The time frame for this project was 180h.