Designing Digital Humans with Ambient Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper proposes integrating ambient intelligence with digital humans to enhance contextual awareness, enabling more proactive, personalized, and environment-aware virtual agents across domains like retail and finance.

Contribution

It introduces a conceptual framework, design space, and architecture for ambient-enabled digital humans, emphasizing context-aware interaction and responsible data governance.

Findings

Framework defining key roles of AmI in digital humans

Design space with dimensions like proactivity and privacy

Case studies in financial and retail services

Abstract

Digital humans are lifelike virtual agents capable of natural conversation and are increasingly deployed in domains like retail and finance. However, most current digital humans operate in isolation from their surroundings and lack contextual awareness beyond the dialogue itself. We address this limitation by integrating ambient intelligence (AmI) - i.e., environmental sensors, IoT data, and contextual modeling - with digital human systems. This integration enables situational awareness of the user's environment, anticipatory and proactive assistance, seamless cross-device interactions, and personalized long-term user support. We present a conceptual framework defining key roles that AmI can play in shaping digital human behavior, a design space highlighting dimensions such as proactivity levels and privacy strategies, and application-driven patterns with case studies in financial and retail services. We also discuss an architecture for ambient-enabled digital humans and provide guidelines for responsible design regarding privacy and data governance. Together, our work positions ambient intelligent digital humans as a new class of interactive agents powered by AI that respond not only to users' queries but also to the context and situations in which the interaction occurs.