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ECA’s In E-Commerce Applications 269

were designed to offer the same enhancement in each application, i.e. assist-
ing the user with their tasks. Thirdly, it was hypothesised that the stereotypes
created (formal and informal) would be better suited to different application
environments. In general assistants in cinema box offices dress casually and
those in banks more formally. It was predicted that the situation in the virtual
environments would mirror these real life scenarios. Finally, as the verbal and
non-verbal behaviour for all the agents was identical it was predicted that at-
titudes to the agents’ functionality, aspects of personality and trustworthiness
would be similar within and between the applications.

2.1 Experimental Platform Design

The system architecture is based on a client-server system. Using a
speech recogniser, the users speech input is captured on the client PC. A Java-
based dialogue manager controls the direction of the dialogue as the user com-
pletes a task in each application. The 3D applications (Figure 33.1) were cre-
ated using VRML97, the international standard file format for describing inter-
active 3D multimedia on the Internet. The VRML code is stored on the server
PC.

Figure 33.1. Images of ECA’s in Applications

The embodied agents were created using MetaCreations Poser 4.0, a char-
acter animation software tool. The agents were exported to VRML97 where
the code was fitted to the H-Anim specification template [11]. This specifi-
cation is a standard way of representing humanoids in VRML97. Using this
specification it was possible to obtain access to the joints of the agent to create
gestures and mouth movements. Four gestures were created for the embodied
agents: nodding, waving, shrugging and typing. One male and one female
voice recorded the necessary output prompts for the male and female agents
respectively. All four agents had the same verbal output.

2.2 Experimental Procedure
Participants (N = 36) were randomly assigned all conditions in a 2x2x3
repeated measures design: agent gender (male, female), agent type (formal,
informal), application (cinema, travel, bank). The presentation of the agents
to the participants was randomised within the applications and applications