FlurMax: An interactive virtual agent for entertaining visitors in a hallway

FlurMax, a virtual agent, inhabits a hallway at the University of Bielefeld. He resides in a wide-screen panel equipped with a video camera to track and interact with visitors using speech, gesture, and emotional facial expression. For example, FlurMax will detect the presence of visitors and greet them with a friendly wave, saying "Hello, I am Max". FlurMax also recognizes simple gesturing of the by-passer, such as waving, and produces natural multimodal behaviors in response. FlurMax's behavior selection is controlled by a simple emotional/motivational system which gradually changes his mood between states like happy, bored, surprised, and neutral.