avatars Papers

This report documents the work done for the Technology Strategy Board feasibility study Applying Techniques from Intelligent Robotics to Autonomous Avatars in Virtual Worlds. At a high level this project can be seen as taking theories and technologies developed for building intelligent robots that interact with humans and their surroundings [5, 16] and investigating how they operate in Second Life (SL).The following section describes the background to the project in more detail, then subsequent sections detail the work... Read more

Unlike computer games where Non-Player-Character avatars are common, in most virtual worlds they are the exception. Deploying an embodied AI into a virtual world offers a unique opportunity to evaluate embodied AIs, and to develop them within an environment where human and computer are on almost equal terms. This paper presents an architecture being used for the deployment of chatbot driven avatars within the Second Life virtual world, looks at the challenges of deploying an... Read more

In realistic looking game environments it is important that virtual characters behave naturally. Our goal is to produce naturally looking gaze behavior for animated agents and avatars that are simply idling. We studied people standing and waiting, as well as people walking down a shopping street. From our observations we built a demo with the CADIA Populus multi-agent social simulation platform. Read more

The JISC-funded PREVIEW project aims to develop problem-based learning (PBL) scenarios in Second Life (SL) for distance-learning healthcare students. One of the target courses - a Paramedic course run by the joint faculty of St George’s University of London and Kingston University – uses PBL that is based upon a ‘virtual patient’ model. In order to keep scenarios as sustainable and portable as possible we adopted the MedBiquitous VP Standard – or MVP - designed for... Read more

One of the biggest obstacles for constructing effective sociable virtual humans lies in the failure of machines to recognize the desires, feelings and intentions of the human user. Virtual humans lack the ability to fully understand and decode the communication signals human users emit when communicating with each other. This article describes our research in overcoming this problem by developing senses for the virtual humans which enables them to hear and understand human speech,... Read more

An impediment to Web-based retail sales is the impersonal nature of Web-based shopping. A solution to this problem is to use an avatar to deliver product information. An avatar is a graphic representation that can be animated by means of computer technology. Study 1 shows that using an avatar sales agent leads to more satisfaction with the retailer, a more positive attitude toward the product, and a greater purchase intention. Study 2 shows that an attractive... Read more

In this paper we describe a commercial platform for the development of net environments, virtual spaces inhabited by avatars which have been created and are subsequently visited and instructed by users via the Internet. The platform allows extensive data collection. Which data are collected and the scope of analysis will be explained on a theoretical level and by examples from data sets collected from different applications. Read more

Avatars play an important role in international online communities. While certain simple expressions, such as facial emotional expressions are cultural independent, more complex expressions might not be. Therefore we conducted a cross-cultural study to investigate the influence of the users’ cultural background (Japanese or Dutch) on their perception of avatar’s expressions in terms of perceived arousal and valence. A significant gender difference was found for valence. Women and in particular Japanese women rated the expressions more... Read more

This is a research of graphical multi-user communication environments. I have studied the interactive behavior of and between humans and chatterbots. First I will describe the emotional and behavioral impacts that a chatterbot can provoke in users as individuals and as members of a group. Sometimes it is not self-evident to recognize who in a chat room is a bot and who is human. This is due to the limits and possibilities of digital interface,... Read more

Reearch into virtual environments on the one hand and artificial intelligence and artificial life on the other has largely been carried out by two different groups of people with different preoccupations and interests, but some convergence is now apparent between the two fields. Applications in which activity independent of the user takes place — involving crowds or other agents — are beginning to be tackled, while synthetic agents, virtual humans and computer pets are all areas... Read more