virtual human Papers

This demonstration highlights some emerging capabilities for incremental speech understanding and processing in virtual human dialogue systems. This work is part of an ongoing effort that aims to enable realistic spoken dialogue with virtual humans in multi-party negotiation scenarios. These scenarios are designed to allow trainees to practice their negotiation skills by engaging in face-to-face spoken negotiation with one or more virtual humans. Read more

The current practice in virtual human dialogue systems is to use professional human recordings or limited-domain speech synthesis. Both approaches lead to good performance but at a high cost. To determine the best trade-off between performance and cost, we perform a systematic evaluation of human and synthesized voices with regard to naturalness, conversational aspect, and likability. We also vary the type (in-domain vs. out-of-domain), length, and content of utterances, and take into account the age... Read more

With the development of the 3D technology, computer animation has widely applied in many areas such as biology, military affairs and network games etc. The virtual human as the most colorful factor in 3D animation world. Therefore, virtual human animation description language is a hot topic of current research. The contents included in the thesis are as follows:(1) The virtual human modeling in VRML. A virtual human modeling is completed according the H-Anim virtual human... Read more

The fast rendering of large-scale animated human crowds is a very important and interesting problem in research fields of virtual reality, it can be used to do analysis of animated human crowds’regular in museums, theatres, battlefields and so on, owning a bright future. It possesses two main features, one is that the rendering triangular patches are too much, the other is that the human skeletal structures are highly complicated. That makes the rendering of large-scale... Read more

This paper reports on an ongoing effort to enable the rapid development of multi-party virtual human negotiation scenarios. We present a case study in which a new scenario supporting negotiation between two human role players and two virtual humans was developed over a period of 12 weeks. We discuss the methodology and development process that were employed, from storyline design through role play and iterative development of the virtual humans’ semantic and task representations and natural language processing capabilities. We analyze the effort, expertise, and time required for... Read more

Rapport, the feeling of being "in sync" with your conversational partners, is argued to underlie many desirable social effects. By generating proper verbal and nonverbal behaviors, virtual humans have been seen to create rapport during interactions with human users. In this paper, we introduce our approach to creating rapport following Tickle-Degnen and Rosenberg’s threefactor (positivity, mutual attention and coordination) theory of rapport. By comparing with a previously published virtual agent, the ... Read more

Elckerlyc is a BML Realizer for generating multimodal verbal and nonverbal behavior for Virtual Humans (VHs). The main characteristics of Elckerlyc are that (1) it is designed specifically for continuous interaction with tight temporal coordination between the behavior of a VH and its interaction partner; (2) it provides a mix between the precise temporal and spatial control offered by procedural animation and the physical realism of physical simulation; and (3) it is designed to be... Read more

Virtual humans are employed in many interactive applications using 3D virtual environments, including (serious) games. The motion of such virtual humans should look realistic (or ‘natural’) and allow interaction with the surroundings and other (virtual) humans. Current animation techniques differ in the trade-off they offer between motion naturalness and the control that can be exerted over the motion. We show mechanisms to parametrize, combine (on different body parts) and concatenate motions generated by different animation... Read more

For centuries artists have been exploring color to express emotions. Following this insight, the paper describes an approach to learn how to use color to influence the perception of emotions in virtual humans. First, a model of lighting and filters inspired on the visual arts is integrated with a virtual human platform to manipulate color. Next, an evolutionary model, based on genetic algorithms, is created to evolve mappings between emotions and lighting and filter parameters.... Read more

Currently, applications that focus on providing conversations with virtual humans require extensive work to create robust conversational models. We present a new approach called Human-centered Distributed Conversational Modeling. Using this approach, users create conversational models in a distributed manner. To do this, end-users interact with virtual humans to provide new stimuli (questions and statements), and domain-specific experts (e.g. medical/psychology educators) provide new virtual human responses. Using this process, users become the primary developers... Read more