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268 Socially Intelligent Agentsskills as in the real world, enhancing mundane transactions and encouraging asense of presence for the user, resulting in more effective and efficient interaction.Developing further this proposal, Ball [3] demonstrated that endowinganimated agents with personality and emotion creates a sense of social presence,leading to more useful conversational interfaces. The existence of thissocial presence is important in order to begin to understand the developmentof the interaction between the agent and the user. It follows from this thatunderstanding the creation and development of social relationships betweenthe agents and the users is a crucial first step to creating socially intelligentembodied conversational agents.There is little empirical evidence yet available to demonstrate the effectivenessof ECA’s, particularly in e-commerce applications and there is a growingneed for the establishment of objective and subjective measures of usability.Ostermann [10] developed an architecture designed to support e-commerce“by providing a more friendly, helpful and intuitive user interface compared toa regular browser”. Results from experiments using this architecture showedthat facial animation was favoured over text only interfaces. These results areencouraging, but it is also necessary to investigate the range of applications thatcan be significantly enhanced by the presence of an ECA and what are users’attitudes toward their appearance, personality and trustworthiness during theinteraction.The goal of this study is to present empirical evidence in support of the useof the agents within e-commerce domains, in addition to documenting qualitativeand quantitative data regarding users’ subjective experience of successiveinteractions with the agents. A detailed discussion of the experimental findingsis obviously beyond the scope of this section, however the experimentalprocedure, key findings and challenge problems are presented.2. Experimental ResearchThis experiment assessed two types of 3D male and female embodied agents,appearing as assistants in VRML e-commerce applications (cinema, travelagency and bank). The agents types were a smartly dressed (formal) agent anda casually dressed (informal) agent. In order to evaluate the agents, a real-timeexperimental platform system, capable of face-to-face conversation betweenthe user and the agent was used.The first prediction was that participants would believe ECA’s have a role toplay as assistants. This prediction was made based on the results of previousexperiments, where customers passively viewed conversational agents in retailspaces [9] and indicated a desire to actually converse with them. A second predictionwas that participants would enjoy speaking to the agents equally in allthree applications. This prediction was made based on the fact that the agents