Papers about Looks

Realistic clothing and hair animation are necessary for many applications such as film, gaming, and on-line fashion. Thanks to the advances in computer graphics, highly realistic clothing and hair animation can be produced in recent animation movies by a widely used technique called Physically Based Simulation (PBS). Clothing and hair modeling/animation are also important to other fields such as computer vision. For instance, body form estimation from natural photographs or videos will be more precise... Read more

This paper describes results from a large-scale survey to explore users’ comfort with different styles of avatars for workplace communication. Thirty-one avatars were evaluated based on users’ ratings along several dimensions and grouped into five different clusters. The highest rated cluster was the set of formal, realistic avatars that users did not feel were creepy. These avatars were ranked comparatively with webcam photos, and users felt that they would be appropriate for work. Our... Read more

In everyday life, one increasingly encounters virtual characters. Virtual (online) worlds, on the one hand, are populated by avatars, that is, mediated human interlocutors represented by a virtual body. Examples are Second Life or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft. On the other hand, websites, pedagogical programs, or technological devices are increasingly being equipped with virtual characters programmed to act autonomously and to conduct basic verbal and nonverbal interaction with the... Read more

Pedagogical agents – lifelike characters that guide users through multimedia learning environments – are intended to facilitate the learning process. According to social agency theory, the presentation of social cues (the image and voice of the agent) may prime the social interaction schema and cause the learner to deeply process the learning material. Research on pedagogical agents focuses mainly on either the role of the presence of pedagogical agents, by comparing agent and no-agent groups,... Read more

Numerous studies have tested the effects of pedagogical agents on learning and the influence of their specific appearance. What has not been analyzed, however, is whether an agent can have indirect effects when it is employed as a tutor for learning strategies rather than directly teaching the relevant learning material. In a between-subjects design (N = 45) we compared two different kinds of pedagogical agents – a cartoon-like rabbit and a realistic anthropomorphic agent –... Read more

Conversational agents that display many human qualities have become a valuable method business uses to communicate with online users to supply services or products, to help in online order process or to search the Web. The gaming industry and education may benefit from this type of interface. In this type of chats, users could have different alternatives: text display, photo of a real person, or a cartoon drawing and others. This is an exploratory study... Read more

Embodied agents are a powerful paradigm for current and future multimodal interfaces, yet require high effort and expertise for their creation, assembly and animation control. Therefore, open animation engines and high-level control languages are required to make embodied agents accessible to researchers and developers. In this paper, we present EMBR, a new realtime character animation engine that offers a high degree of animation control via the EMBRScript language. We argue that a new layer of... Read more

For many years, the HCI community has harbored a vision of interacting with intelligent, embodied computer agents. However, the reality of this vision remains elusive. From an interaction design perspective, little is known about how to specifically design an embodied agent to support the task it will perform and the social interactions that will result. This paper presents design research that explores the relationship between the visual features of embodied agents and the tasks they... Read more

This paper presents some insights into the effect of ‘virtual gender’ on the way people interact with, make sense of, and build relationships with conversational agents. The focus is on the linkage between sex stereotypes and aggression, in the form of verbal abuse towards the machine. Implications for design of embodied conversational agents are discussed. Read more

In this paper, we present some initial thoughts on the occurrence of verbal abuse in human-chatterbot interaction within the framework of social-cognition. This thinking is an important step towards the understanding of virtual relationships and the design of socially adept technology. Read more