VTutor: An Animated Pedagogical Agent SDK that Provide Real Time Multi-Model Feedback

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Chen, Eason, Lin, Chenyu, Huang, Yu-Kai, Tang, Xinyi, Xi, Aprille, Lin, Jionghao, Koedinger, Kenneth
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866912369840488448
author Chen, Eason
Lin, Chenyu
Huang, Yu-Kai
Tang, Xinyi
Xi, Aprille
Lin, Jionghao
Koedinger, Kenneth
author_facet Chen, Eason
Lin, Chenyu
Huang, Yu-Kai
Tang, Xinyi
Xi, Aprille
Lin, Jionghao
Koedinger, Kenneth
contents Pedagogical Agents (PAs) show significant potential for boosting student engagement and learning outcomes by providing adaptive, on-demand support in educational contexts. However, existing PA solutions are often hampered by pre-scripted dialogue, unnatural animations, uncanny visual realism, and high development costs. To address these gaps, we introduce VTutor, an open-source SDK leveraging lightweight WebGL, Unity, and JavaScript frameworks. VTutor receives text outputs from a large language model (LLM), converts them into audio via text-to-speech, and then renders a real-time, lip-synced pedagogical agent (PA) for immediate, large-scale deployment on web-based learning platforms. By providing on-demand, personalized feedback, VTutor strengthens students' motivation and deepens their engagement with instructional material. Using an anime-like aesthetic, VTutor alleviates the uncanny valley effect, allowing learners to engage with expressive yet comfortably stylized characters. Our evaluation with 50 participants revealed that VTutor significantly outperforms the existing talking-head approaches (e.g., SadTalker) on perceived synchronization accuracy, naturalness, emotional expressiveness, and overall preference. As an open-source project, VTutor welcomes community-driven contributions - from novel character designs to specialized showcases of pedagogical agent applications - that fuel ongoing innovation in AI-enhanced education. By providing an accessible, customizable, and learner-centered PA solution, VTutor aims to elevate human-AI interaction experience in education fields, ultimately broadening the impact of AI in learning contexts. The demo link to VTutor is at https://vtutor-aied25.vercel.app.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_06676
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VTutor: An Animated Pedagogical Agent SDK that Provide Real Time Multi-Model Feedback
Chen, Eason
Lin, Chenyu
Huang, Yu-Kai
Tang, Xinyi
Xi, Aprille
Lin, Jionghao
Koedinger, Kenneth
Human-Computer Interaction
Pedagogical Agents (PAs) show significant potential for boosting student engagement and learning outcomes by providing adaptive, on-demand support in educational contexts. However, existing PA solutions are often hampered by pre-scripted dialogue, unnatural animations, uncanny visual realism, and high development costs. To address these gaps, we introduce VTutor, an open-source SDK leveraging lightweight WebGL, Unity, and JavaScript frameworks. VTutor receives text outputs from a large language model (LLM), converts them into audio via text-to-speech, and then renders a real-time, lip-synced pedagogical agent (PA) for immediate, large-scale deployment on web-based learning platforms. By providing on-demand, personalized feedback, VTutor strengthens students' motivation and deepens their engagement with instructional material. Using an anime-like aesthetic, VTutor alleviates the uncanny valley effect, allowing learners to engage with expressive yet comfortably stylized characters. Our evaluation with 50 participants revealed that VTutor significantly outperforms the existing talking-head approaches (e.g., SadTalker) on perceived synchronization accuracy, naturalness, emotional expressiveness, and overall preference. As an open-source project, VTutor welcomes community-driven contributions - from novel character designs to specialized showcases of pedagogical agent applications - that fuel ongoing innovation in AI-enhanced education. By providing an accessible, customizable, and learner-centered PA solution, VTutor aims to elevate human-AI interaction experience in education fields, ultimately broadening the impact of AI in learning contexts. The demo link to VTutor is at https://vtutor-aied25.vercel.app.
title VTutor: An Animated Pedagogical Agent SDK that Provide Real Time Multi-Model Feedback
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06676