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ECA’s In E-Commerce Applications 269were designed to offer the same enhancement in each application, i.e. assistingthe user with their tasks. Thirdly, it was hypothesised that the stereotypescreated (formal and informal) would be better suited to different applicationenvironments. In general assistants in cinema box offices dress casually andthose in banks more formally. It was predicted that the situation in the virtualenvironments would mirror these real life scenarios. Finally, as the verbal andnon-verbal behaviour for all the agents was identical it was predicted that attitudesto the agents’ functionality, aspects of personality and trustworthinesswould be similar within and between the applications.2.1 Experimental Platform DesignThe system architecture is based on a client-server system. Using aspeech recogniser, the users speech input is captured on the client PC. A Javabaseddialogue manager controls the direction of the dialogue as the user completesa task in each application. The 3D applications (Figure 33.1) were createdusing VRML97, the international standard file format for describing interactive3D multimedia on the Internet. The VRML code is stored on the serverPC.Figure 33.1.Images of ECA’s in ApplicationsThe embodied agents were created using MetaCreations Poser 4.0, a characteranimation software tool. The agents were exported to VRML97 wherethe code was fitted to the H-Anim specification template [11]. This specificationis a standard way of representing humanoids in VRML97. Using thisspecification it was possible to obtain access to the joints of the agent to creategestures and mouth movements. Four gestures were created for the embodiedagents: nodding, waving, shrugging and typing. One male and one femalevoice recorded the necessary output prompts for the male and female agentsrespectively. All four agents had the same verbal output.2.2 Experimental ProcedureParticipants (N = 36) were randomly assigned all conditions in a 2x2x3repeated measures design: agent gender (male, female), agent type (formal,informal), application (cinema, travel, bank). The presentation of the agentsto the participants was randomised within the applications and applications