Interactive Videogames

The domain we came up with was interactive videogames.
There are a host of reasons
1. It's a big industry, so there are a lot of users and fair amount of resources.
2. Multiplayer games are more fun because the other agents are really good, so good AI agents would be really marketable.
3. From an academic point of view, games also provide an excellent form of a restricted Turing test.
4. There can also be a range of agents from simple helpers to complex agents that retain state.
So, we looked around for a good agent to build and came up with the game half-life.
It has a 3-D graphics engine with some existing agents.
It's shareware, and there seems to be a relatively large community of users.
A reasonably sophisticated conversational agent require a reasonably sophisticated task. An agent in a game can be relatively simple, very complex, or anything in between.