IDI Press Release – December 12, 2000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

IDI is proud to announce a virtual dialogue with
Congressman Major Owens

December 12, 2000 — Major Owens, newly re-elected for his 10^th term in Congress and now the senior representative from Brooklyn, New York, speaks from his Capitol Hill office in Interactive Drama’s most recent “Conversations with Experts in Cyberspace” program, the second in this CD-ROM series.  Owens, a democrat, is known as “the education congressman.”  He has served on the “Education and the Workforce” committee for his entire congressional career. Owens also represents education and technology issues as a leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

What distinguishes IDI's "Conversations with Experts in Cyberspace" programs is their powerful combination of speech recognition, digital video, and microprocessor technologies that allows users to conduct face-to-face virtual dialogues with notable individuals who would otherwise not be accessible.  Users feel as if they are meeting and talking with the experts as they conduct the give-and-take exchange.

The user can ask Congressman Owens a wide range of questions about the issues facing Congress and the nation, as well as his own constituents.  Such questions include: "How can technology improve education?” "What exactly is the digital divide?” "What is the Black Caucus?” "How do you empower a community?”  Owens also answers questions about his background and his unusual path to Congress.  The dynamic intelligent prompting method in every Virtual ConversationsÔ 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 with the Congressman 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