Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2024

Abstract

Generative AI tools can provide people with the ability to create virtual environments and scenes with natural language prompts. Yet, how people will formulate such prompts is unclear---particularly when they inhabit the environment that they are designing. For instance, it is likely that a person might say, "Put a chair here,'' while pointing at a location. If such linguistic and embodied features are common to people's prompts, we need to tune models to accommodate them. In this work, we present a Wizard of Oz elicitation study with 22 participants, where we studied people's implicit expectations when verbally prompting such programming agents to create interactive VR scenes. Our findings show when people prompted the agent, they had several implicit expectations of these agents: (1) they should have an embodied knowledge of the environment; (2) they should understand embodied prompts by users; (3) they should recall previous states of the scene and the conversation, and that (4) they should have a commonsense understanding of objects in the scene. Further, we found that participants prompted differently when they were prompting in situ (i.e. within the VR environment) versus ex situ (i.e. viewing the VR environment from the outside). To explore how these lessons could be applied, we designed and built Ostaad, a conversational programming agent that allows non-programmers to design interactive VR experiences that they inhabit. Based on these explorations, we outline new opportunities and challenges for conversational programming agents that create VR environments.

Keywords

generative ai, virtual reality, prompting, interactive virtual reality, multi-modal, embodied prompting, embodied interaction

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

DIS '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, Copenhagen Denmark, July 1-5

First Page

2319

Last Page

2340

ISBN

9798400705830

Identifier

10.1145/3643834.3661547

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661547

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