Virtual teachers outperform real thing

"Working with Baldi can be less intimidating because students don't feel shy about making mistakes," said Massaro, whose Animated Speech Corporation also has produced software with digital tutors that is used to teach vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and speech articulation to children who are hard-of-hearing.

Baldi also features a realistic view of the inside of the mouth complete with tongue, teeth and palate, that play little movies for students to watch on iPods and other mp3 players in various cutaways and angles to help them learn how to form new sounds in such languages as English, Chinese and Arabic. The videos are based on ultrasound images of speaking mouths and "electropalatography" sensors placed along the palate that are used to create 3-D real-time data.

The goal is to realistically mimic the natural processes of speech observed by Massaro and others in experiments.

Being digital, Baldi is tireless compared to human teachers who get worn out from children's ongoing requests for attention. And Baldi is available 24/7, which is great especially for autistic kids who sometimes keep unconventional sleeping hours.

Toning it down
Digital teachers are better teachers than humans along some dimensions, says Jeremy Bailenson, a communications researcher at Stanford University, who has conducted numerous experiments demonstrating the benefits that virtual environments have over reality.

He has worked with Cassell in the past, though not on autistics nor on the research presented here.

"I think the best aspect of virtual reality (VR) for this application is the ability to build virtual humans that can 'scale' in the amount of socialness they exude," Bailenson told LiveScience. VR allows participants to send only small amounts of non-verbal or facial expressions to the other person with whom they are communicating, which benefits autistics who often cannot deal with the intensity of face-to-face conversations. Speakers can create renderings of themselves that are toned down or abstract.

"In this sense, communicating in real-time via avatars may be the best way for [autistics] to be social and learn these skills," Bailenson said.

Embodied teaching agents are helpful to specialists who work with autistic students, allowing teachers to match the expressiveness level of the student.

"By detecting the gestures of the student in real-time and then rendering a similar degree of socialness on the embodied agent, virtual humans may be particularly comforting as teachers for students," Bailenson said.

Despite the efficacy of digital approaches to education, there is a reluctance in society for such tools to become widespread, a discomfort with the idea that human teachers might be replaced by virtual teachers on a widescale basis, Cassell said.

"I believe that the reason that virtual reality and other interventions like this scare us is ... because we are scared that we don't have the time to interact with our children the way that we'd like to," she said.

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