virtual human Papers

Emotive virtual humans (VHs) are important for affective interactions with embodied conversation agents. However, emotive VHs require significant resources and time. As an example, the VHs in movies and video games require teams of animators and months of work. VHs can also be imbued with emotion using appraisal theory methods that use psychology based models to generate emotions by using the VH's goals and beliefs to evaluate external events. These external events require manual tagging... 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 of conversational... Read more

Moral emotions have been argued to play a central role in the emergence of cooperation in human-human interactions. This work describes an experiment which tests whether this insight carries to virtual human-human interactions. In particular, the paper describes a repeated-measures experiment where subjects play the iterated prisoner's dilemma with two versions of the virtual human: (a) neutral, which is the control condition; (b) moral, which is identical to the control condition except that the... Read more

Recent studies have shown that virtual humans can facilitate social interactions among people who have difficulty in forming social bonds or help develop their social skills by interaction with virtual practice. Virtual human research tends to focus exclusively on appearance or behavior in assessing agent effectiveness, whereas other studies of human social interaction emphasize aspects of the social context, such as anticipated future interaction (AFI) which has been implicated as a key moderator of people's... Read more

We propose a computational model for building a tactile body schema for a virtual human. The learned body structure of the agent can enable it to acquire a perception of the space surrounding its body, namely its peripersonal space. The model uses tactile and proprioceptive informations and relies on an algorithm which was originally applied with visual and proprioceptive sensor data. In order to feed the model, we present work on obtaining the nessessary sensory... Read more

Gunslinger is an interactive-entertainment application of virtual humans that transforms an iconic Wild West movie scene into a vivid semblance of reality. The project combines virtual humans technology with Hollywood storytelling and set building into an engaging, mixed-reality, story-driven experience, where a single participant can interact verbally and non-verbally with multiple virtual characters that are imbedded in a real, physical saloon. The Gunslinger project pushes the frontier of virtual humans research by combining question-answering dialogue... Read more

Although there is progress in modeling and implementing affective phenomena - computation of emotion - the new direction proposed here is to model and represent irrational and subconscious processes, the hidden aspects of the human psyche as analysed by Freud and his successors, and by other disciplines in psychotherapy. The outcome will be a 'psychodynamics engine' that does not simply respond emotionally to context and interaction, but is driven by its own convoluted patterns, triggers and... Read more

This poster reports the results of two experiments to test a personality framework for virtual characters. We use the Tactical Questioning dialogue system architecture (TACQ) [1] as a testbed for this effort. Characters built using the TACQ architecture can be used by trainees to practice their questioning skills by engaging in a role-play with a virtual human. The architecture supports advanced behavior in a questioning setting, including deceptive behavior, simple negotiations about whether to answer,... Read more

Virtual Humans are artificial characters who look and act like humans, but inhabit a simulated environment. One important aspect of many virtual humans is their communicative dialogue ability. In this paper we outline a methodology for study of dialogue behavior and construction of virtual humans. We also consider three architectures for different types of virtual humans that have been built at the Institute for Creative Technologies. Read more

Researchers demand much from their embodied conversational agents (ECAs), requiring them to be both life-like, as well as responsive to events in an interactive setting. We find that a flexible combination of animation approaches may be needed to satisfy these needs. In this paper we present SmartBody, an open source modular framework for animating ECAs in real time, based on the notion of hierarchically connected animation controllers. Controllers in SmartBody can employ arbitrary animation algorithms... Read more