How turn-taking influences the perception of a suspect in police interviews

We study turn-taking behaviour in non-cooperative dialogue for the development of believable characters in a serious game for conversational skill learning in the police interview context. We describe a perception study to see how participants perceive a suspect’s interpersonal stance, rapport, face, and deception when the turn-taking of the subject varies. We influence the perception of the suspect’s stance by altering the timing of the start of speech with respect to the ending of the interlocutor’s speech. The results of the study contribute to the development of an embodied conversational agent capable of natural human-system conversation with appropriate turn-taking behaviour

Life-Sized Audiovisual Spatial Social Scenes with Multiple Characters: MARC & SMART-I²

International audienceWith the increasing use of virtual characters in virtual and mixed reality settings, the coordination of realism in audiovisual rendering and expressive virtual characters becomes a key issue. In this paper we introduce a new system combining two systems for tackling the issue of realism and high quality in audiovisual rendering and life-sized expressive characters. The goal of the resulting SMART-MARC platform is to investigate the impact of realism on multiple levels: spatial audiovisual rendering of a scene, appearance and expressive behaviors of virtual characters. Potential interactive applications include mediated communication in virtual worlds, therapy, game, arts and elearning. Future experimental studies will focus on 3D audio/visual coherence, social perception and ecologically valid interaction scenes