'Baldi' Helps Kids With Autism
Virtual Talking Head Teaches Autistic Children Language Skills
By Martin F. Downs
WebMD Medical News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD
Feb. 15, 2008 (Boston) -- Children generally love to play with computers, but many children with autism prefer interacting with a computer to conversing with a person. Many scientists have been working on ways to take advantage of that to help autistic kids learn.
A virtual talking head, or "embodied conversational agent," nicknamed Baldi by its creators, is one of the latest technologies being used to teach language skills to autistic kids. Dominic Massaro, PhD, a language researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, demonstrated Baldi at this week's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
If you've seen virtual characters in video games, you may notice that as realistically rendered as they may be, their mouths typically don't move in a natural way when speaking. The difference with Baldi is the extent to which Massaro has realistically modeled the virtual mouth movements. Baldi's whole face -- including the tongue, jaw, and lips -- moves the way a real person's does when making different spoken sounds. This is important for learning, Massaro says, because language is learned not only by ear but also by sight. "People use cues from both the face and the voice," he says.
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Rises as gladly in the single tree
As in the whole orchards resonant with bees."
- Emerson
16 Feb 2008, 10:13 am
