To be honest, it wasn't too difficult to track down the woman who served as the model for the virtual receptionist in the Situated Interaction demo. Her name is Andrea, and she works as a group assistant in Building 99, the headquarters of Microsoft Research Redmond.

Andrea isn't actually a receptionist; she just plays one on computer screens.

But she used to be. That's how she encountered Eric Horvitz.

"They originally told me they were going to do it when I was still a receptionist," she recalls. "I think I was talking to Eric. They had a different avatar originally, and they wanted to update it because it was an older version. They were excited about the project and didn't want to revamp it, essentially. So we just started talking about it, and they said, 'Hey, how would you feel about that?' and I said, 'I think it would be fun.' So I did it."

Horvitz says Andrea, whom he calls "my favorite admin," seemed a natural.

"I thought she’d be a great person," he says. "She was willing to help. She’s friendly and smart. She’s expressive. We had to catch her expressions. We have a whole folder, a day of video, where she went through all the sequences: awe, surprise, disgust, all the phonemes. We just started rendering them, but we have her on tape, so we can go deep."

Happiness, sorrow, surprise, amusement: Andrea's range of emotions bring the virtual receptionist to life.

Andrea agreed to sit for a couple of photo shoots, which ranged from the glamorous to the peculiar.

"For the first photo shoot," she recalls, "I came in, and they did all my makeup, which was fun! They had me sit in the big room at Microsoft Studios, on this stool, and they would get really close and take pictures all the way around, and I would move a millimeter, and they would say, 'Your posture! You're slumping!' The first one, I had to do a lot of expressions, which was really hard. [laughs] I don't know how to make a sad face! Was I supposed to be overly expressive? I had to do the visemes, I would start a word and then stop, so they could catch the shape of my mouth. Then they had me do a live recording. People would come up, and I would react the way I normally would at the reception desk. They videotaped several of those interactions.

"The second one was just primarily pictures and trying to get more angles--and really close up to my teeth. I had to hold my mouth open, and they got really, really close to my teeth. I think they wanted to get the texture. That was funny."

Andrea first got a glimpse of her avatar last September, right after the second photo shoot and right before Microsoft's annual company meeting. 

"It was crazy," she says, "because it looked so much like me. I was really surprised, because Eric was saying: 'Now, you know, it's really at the bottom level. We haven't really refined it yet.' But I was surprised at how good it was, actually."

Having been "discovered" at the Building 99 receptionist desk, Andrea, naturally, had a few suggestions to offer to the researchers.

"When we were shooting the live footage," she says, "and I was reacting as I would as a receptionist, yeah, there were times when I said, 'No, I probably would do it this way or I would respond this way.' Some of the scripts they had me change a little bit, but not too much. I guess that would be the little added bit. They asked some questions about certain things, but it wasn't too much."

The virtualization experience has given Andrea a taste of being a celebrity of sorts in Microsoft circles.

"Probably like once a week," she smiles, "somebody says, 'Oh, so you ...' and I'm like, 'Yeah, it's me.' [laughs] But most people don't recognize me unless they knew me before. It's usually people I know who recognize me. They'll come back and say, 'A few months ago, I saw this thing ...' 'Yeah, it was me.' "

Sounds like an enjoyable adventure.

"It's pretty good," she says. "It's fun. I like it. It allows me to bond with people in a different way. They recognize me, so it's almost like an icebreaker sometimes.That's cool."

But there was one tiny drawback, pertaining to a trivia-game research project in which her avatar was used.

"I took the trivia test, because they had it in the kitchenette to gather data," she says, "and my virtual self beat myself. My virtual self was smarter than my actual self!

"That was a humbling experience."

 
Dan Bohus (left), Eric Horvitz, and the two Andreas