Institute for Creative Technologies

The Human Embodiment project researches the outward behavior of virtual humans. Virtual humans are autonomous agents that inhabit virtual worlds and interact with people immersed in the virtual world, much like people interact with each other in the real world. To support the interaction, virtual humans must satisfy three requirements. They must be:

• Believable--The virtual human must have a sufficient illusion of human-like behavior to draw a human user into the experience.
• Responsive--The virtual human must respond to the human user and to the events surrounding it.
• Interpretable--An immersed human user must be able to interpret the virtual human's responses to situations, including its dynamic cognitive and emotional state, using the same verbal and nonverbal behaviors that people use to understand one another.

To create believable, responsive and interpretable behaviors, the virtual human's physical characteristics that the trainee sees must be believable. The virtual human body must be responsive to events in the virtual world. It must express realistic emotions, in its facial expressions, gestures, and postures. It must be able to carry on spoken dialogues with humans and other agents, including all nonverbal behaviors that accompany, augment, and regulate human dialog (e.g., eye contact and gaze aversion, postural shifts, facial displays, and gestures). The project's research seeks to understand and model when particular behaviors are exhibited, their communicative functions, and the emotions, personality, and cultural factors encoded in the behaviors.

Research will also focus on how the behaviors are interpreted by observers and how the behaviors influence observers. Finally, the team will expore the physical qualities of motions, the messages those motions convey to the observer, and most importantly how to recreate the motions in a virtual human body.

This project differs from others in the following ways:

• It focuses on making believable, interpretable, and responsive virtual humans. (Other groups typically focus on a subset of these requirements.)
• It creates responsive virtual humans that co-habit a virtual world with a human.
• It seeks to model realistic, well-crafted behaviors for virtual humans.

Tags: human, immersion, learning, virtual

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