Kevin Sherman — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:33 GMT

I started developing interactive video strategies about 6 years while attempting to jazz up my personal site a bit.

Since that time, I have advanced my techniques and worked through many technical and UI issues to create somewhat dynamic characters that speak pre-scripted dialog responses whenever site visitors interact with them.

Even though the whole process and the responses are pre-scripted, they generally come across in a seamless manner for the end user. The end user knows these are not real people, but the idea that a character, in video form or any other, is directly interacting with them, is a powerful concept.

This type of character development on HTML pages can provide support, or help users navigate through complex or confusing areas on a site. For example, years ago I built a solution for State Farm Insurance in which I developed an interactive character based solution on their site that helped users sign-up for auto insurance.

Simple in theory, hard to accomplish when dealing with the multitude of technical and UI issues that need to be overcome to create a seamless, clear and direct interaction.

In its simplest form, architecting these types of interactions, is similar in respect to game development, in which you might have two doors for the end user to go through. So you need to build an entire structure to support both paths.

However, when you get into on-the-fly loading issues, so that there is no delay in conversation for the end user, things get a bit more complicated.

It is in this area, discussing the issues around developing dynamic discussions of interactive characters, that I think an interesting article might be written.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Kevin Sherman