IDI Press Release – July 7, 2001

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

IDI is proud to announce a virtual dialogue with 
Dr. James Gordon, White House Health Policy Advisor

March 6, 2001 — James Gordon, M.D., chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Health Care Policy, offers his insight as one of the nation’s authorities on mind-body medicine in the latest program in Interactive Drama’s “Conversations with Experts in Cyberspace” CD-ROM series.  Dr. Gordon is the founder and director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C., and a clinical professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine.  Drawing on 30 years of clinical practice, research, and personal experience, Dr. Gordon shares his perspective on complementary and alternative medicine in the 21st century.

IDI's "Conversations with Experts in Cyberspace" programs give users an opportunity to conduct “face-to-face” interviews of notable people who would otherwise not be accessible to them.  Users feel as if they are meeting and talking with the experts as they engage them in a two-way virtual dialogue.

In this program, users can ask Dr. Gordon a wide range of questions about complementary and alternative medicine, a subject of increasing interest to Americans, who are becoming aware of health care options that have not been available through conventional medicine.  Such questions include:  "Will complementary medicine be influential in the 21st century?”  "Where do you see gene therapy fitting in?” "Will pharmaceuticals play a significant role?” "What exactly is alternative medicine?” and many others.  The dynamic intelligent prompting method in every Virtual Conversations™ program displays a continuous stream of relevant, cogent questions for the user to ask.  There is enough information on the CD-ROM to conduct a meaningful, uninterrupted conversation for nearly an hour.

This program is one in a series being developed with a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Department of Defense.  The series will be distributed widely for educational purposes.

About IDI
IDI has been creating voice-activated interactive video simulations since 1984. The company's founders began this research and development at the National Library of Medicine’s Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. Subsequent R&D has been funded by SBIR grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and DARPA.

The educational effectiveness of the method has been validated repeatedly in rigorous scientific experiments funded by these agencies. In 1991, IDI was awarded U.S. Patent No. 5,006,987 to protect this unique method of dialogue with a virtual human subject. Subsequently, IDI developed a dynamic, intelligent prompting system to help users conduct a focused and informative dialogue with Virtual Conversations™ characters. In 1997, U.S. Patent No. 5,730,603 was awarded to protect the intelligent prompting method. A third patent is pending.

For More Information Contact:

Marcia A. Zier
Interactive Drama Inc.
7900 Wisconsin Avenue Suite 200, Bethesda, MD 20814
Tel: 301.654.0676
FAX: 301.657.9174
Email: mzier@idrama.com