DATASCAPE

Make virtual environments seem more lived in and more real

Help students through a task through an in-world guide, coach, mentor, expert or motivator - all subtly different roles

Use van Velsens film inspired 3-tier model of NPCs (extras-minor roles-stars) to focus your NPC investment

Store as much of the NPC logic outside of the world for portability, re-use and ease of management

Think about NPC race, gender and orientation and how they affect the training, and the trainee's lived experience

Text-based input is problematic in VR, and speech-recognition still not quite there - so how best to implement NPCs in VR?

Use visual cues to reflect NPC inner states

Think through the pros and cons of using recorded voice or text-to-speech

Give participants a better idea of the real-world impact of their actions

Use social media as a potential additional open-source intelligence channel

By automating the "background noise" hand-crafted messages that reflect a golden-thread or Master Event List serial aren't so obvious to the players

Have agents reflect different levels of chattiness, and expertise

Give agents allegiances and sentiments, and have them change dynamically as the player actions evolve

Use templating, variables and synonym approaches to generate thousands of message variations for minimal human set-up effort.

Leverage the concept of "anonymous intimacy" - where people find talking to a chatbot an intimate experience, but also thinks its anonymous and non-judgmental - so they tend to reveal more than when talking to a human or just filling out a form

Think carefully about the persona of the bot, and how it might need to reflect the persona of the user (either echoing it or deliberately countering it)

The information exchanged is likely to be highly personal and confidential, so security and privacy are paramount

Integrate the mental health/support aspects of the bot with support for day-to-day activities, so the bot can be pro-active, and talking to the bot doesn't become a chore.

The Reflexive Bot starts by identifying the type of issue in order to select the appropriate set of agents

The Bot asks some clarification questions which can help to choose the most appropriate questions for the agents

The Bot then guides the user through talking to each agent in turn - in De Bono terms this would be the White Hat (facts), Red Hat (gut feel), Yellow Hat (pros), Black Hat (cons), Green Hat (new ideas), Blue Hat (process)

Agents can flag responses that don't match the agent perspective, and users can flag key insights

The whole experience could be opened up to a large cohort to garner varied opinions and ideas in a very structured way

Bots and Agents can reflect a whole range of lenses, such as PESTLE, ASCOPE, PMESII and the 7 Questions.

Gets user to think about the broader implications of a project, especially ethical and moral implications

A proper virtual world presents a virtual character with most of the same challenges as a physical robot in a physical world

The robotic avatar (robotar) has access to the same information and capabilities as a human - it's a level playing field

By immediate sight a user can't tell what's a human avatar and what's a robotar - so a level playing field for things like the Turing test (which we've passed in a virtual world)

The robotar needs to build spatial awareness, and spatially aware conversation - how do you implement the cocktail party effect for a robotar?

Ideally the robotar learns thing in/about the environment, rather than having them programmed - for instance Halo learnt to fear snakes as they reduce her health in SL.

This is really about corporate knowledge management, not bots

Extensive use of knowledge graphs and semantic triples for information storage

Knowledge modelled on the biologically inspired semantic, episodic and procedural categories - all stored as triples

Background data mined from public sources, but with a personal filter

Personal data added by the bot "boot-strapping" from empty, based purely on a set of knowledge classes and structured conversations with the Subject

Demonstrations of adding more data direct from personal electronic sources - emails, phone, calendar, tweets

It seems that the "Virtual Barry" is now better known in Dstl than the real Barry!

When merged with a personal assistant/virtual life coach the creation of  your Virtual Persona could become a by-product of your day-to-day activity. See the "digital traces" audio at the bottom of the page!

If we crack the Virtual Persona then Digital Immortality really just becomes a hosting plan (my 2015 TEDxBrum presentation)

We need to differentiate between active and passive forms of Digital Afterlife/Digital Immortality

How will the courts view a Digital Immortal?

Our ad-hoc surveys show people are keener to have an Immortal version of themselves than they are of their loved-ones (!)

How would even moderate Virtual Personas affect the grieving and closure process?

Read my chapter on the technical issues of Digital Immortality (and the other chapters) in Maggi and Victoria's Digital Afterlife book.