The NICE project

About the NICE project...

Background

NICE (Natural Interactive Communication for Edutainment) is a 3-year European Human Language Technologies (HLT) project which started on 1 March 2002 and ended in February 2005.

Objectives

NICE has aimed to demonstrate universal natural interactive access, in particular for children and adolescents, by developing natural, fun and experientially rich communication between humans and embodied historical and literary characters. The communication consists of domain-oriented spoken conversation combined with 2D input gesture into a 3D dynamic graphics virtual world inhabited by the fairy-tale author Hans Christian Andersen and animated characters from his fairy-tale universe. For the first time, professional computer games technologies have been joined with advanced spoken interaction, and speech recognition technology has been specially developed for recognising the speech and spoken linguistic behaviour of children and adolescents.

Goals

The NICE consortium has worked on attaining the following innovative results:

high-recognition-rate, robust and entertaining conversation with children, adolescents and adults;
high-interaction-success domain-oriented spoken conversation;
a knowledge representation formalism for encoding complex facts about the domain and personality traits and mental states of virtual characters;
naturally communicating and acting interface agents in games industry-quality graphics;
new dialogue management methods for high-complexity multimodal edutainment applications;
new methods for multimodal input interpretation;
a framework for rapidly specifying virtual worlds inhabited by embodied characters;
portable and re-usable system architecture and components in the field;
new evaluation methods and coding schemes for natural human-system interaction.

Outcome

The outcome of NICE has been systems in two different languages (English and Swedish) demonstrating entertaining and educative immersive multisensorial interaction as well as easy portability to new languages and applications.

Second prototype

In February 2005 the second system prototype of the Hans Christian Andersen (HCA) study and the fairy tale world (FTW) was finished. Examples from the HCA study and the FTW:

HCA conversation (in English, 14MB)
FTW game (in Swedish, 12MB)

NICE conversation

With the final speech synthesis voice of Hans Christian Andersen (September 2004) are here a few examples of user conversation.

First prototype

In December 2003 the first system prototype of the Hans Christian Andersen (HCA) study and the fairy tale world was finished. See some examples from the HCA study:

HCA asks the user (2,4MB)
See the HCA study (4,0MB)
Point and/or ask in the HCA study (4,5MB)

The AVI files are compresed with DivX 5.1.1 video codec and MP3 audio codec.

Graphics rendering in progress

Characters (December 2002)
Scenes from the Fairy Tale World (December 2002)
HCA study graphics (March 2003)

Past NICE events

Contact NICE

Niels Ole Bernsen (NICE coordinator)
Natural Interactive Systems Laboratory (NISLab)
University of Southern Denmark - Odense
Campusvej 55
DK-5230 Odense M
Denmark
Tel. (+45) 6550 3544
Fax (+45) 6550 3849
Email:
URL: www.nis.sdu.dk
NICE URL: www.niceproject.com

Last modified:
Mon, 30-Jan-2006 16:50:01 CET
By: The webmaster

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