28,212 research outputs found
The Challenge of Believability in Video Games: Definitions, Agents Models and Imitation Learning
In this paper, we address the problem of creating believable agents (virtual
characters) in video games. We consider only one meaning of believability,
``giving the feeling of being controlled by a player'', and outline the problem
of its evaluation. We present several models for agents in games which can
produce believable behaviours, both from industry and research. For high level
of believability, learning and especially imitation learning seems to be the
way to go. We make a quick overview of different approaches to make video
games' agents learn from players. To conclude we propose a two-step method to
develop new models for believable agents. First we must find the criteria for
believability for our application and define an evaluation method. Then the
model and the learning algorithm can be designed
Design and semantics of form and movement (DeSForM 2006)
Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM) grew from applied research exploring emerging design methods and practices to support new generation product and interface design. The products and interfaces are concerned with: the context of ubiquitous computing and ambient technologies and the need for greater empathy in the pre-programmed behaviour of the âmachinesâ that populate our lives. Such explorative research in the CfDR has been led by Young, supported by Kyffin, Visiting Professor from Philips Design and sponsored by Philips Design over a period of four years (research funding ÂŁ87k). DeSForM1 was the first of a series of three conferences that enable the presentation and debate of international work within this field: âą 1st European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM1), Baltic, Gateshead, 2005, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. âą 2nd European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM2), Evoluon, Eindhoven, 2006, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. âą 3rd European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM3), New Design School Building, Newcastle, 2007, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. Philips sponsorship of practice-based enquiry led to research by three teams of research students over three years and on-going sponsorship of research through the Northumbria University Design and Innovation Laboratory (nuDIL). Young has been invited on the steering panel of the UK Thinking Digital Conference concerning the latest developments in digital and media technologies. Informed by this research is the work of PhD student Yukie Nakano who examines new technologies in relation to eco-design textiles
First impressions: A survey on vision-based apparent personality trait analysis
© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology
The goal of this article is to present a first list of ethical concerns that may arise from research and personal use of virtual reality (VR) and related technology, and to offer concrete recommendations for minimizing those risks. Many of the recommendations call for focused research initiatives. In the first part of the article, we discuss the relevant evidence from psychology that motivates our concerns. In Section âPlasticity in the Human Mind,â we cover some of the main results suggesting that oneâs environment can influence oneâs psychological states, as well as recent work on inducing illusions of embodiment. Then, in Section âIllusions of Embodiment and Their Lasting Effect,â we go on to discuss recent evidence indicating that immersion in VR can have psychological effects that last after leaving the virtual environment. In the second part of the article, we turn to the risks and recommendations. We begin, in Section âThe Research Ethics of VR,â with the research ethics of VR, covering six main topics: the limits of experimental environments, informed consent, clinical risks, dual-use, online research, and a general point about the limitations of a code of conduct for research. Then, in Section âRisks for Individuals and Society,â we turn to the risks of VR for the general public, covering four main topics: long-term immersion, neglect of the social and physical environment, risky content, and privacy. We offer concrete recommendations for each of these 10 topics, summarized in Table 1
Understanding the Predictability of Gesture Parameters from Speech and their Perceptual Importance
Gesture behavior is a natural part of human conversation. Much work has
focused on removing the need for tedious hand-animation to create embodied
conversational agents by designing speech-driven gesture generators. However,
these generators often work in a black-box manner, assuming a general
relationship between input speech and output motion. As their success remains
limited, we investigate in more detail how speech may relate to different
aspects of gesture motion. We determine a number of parameters characterizing
gesture, such as speed and gesture size, and explore their relationship to the
speech signal in a two-fold manner. First, we train multiple recurrent networks
to predict the gesture parameters from speech to understand how well gesture
attributes can be modeled from speech alone. We find that gesture parameters
can be partially predicted from speech, and some parameters, such as path
length, being predicted more accurately than others, like velocity. Second, we
design a perceptual study to assess the importance of each gesture parameter
for producing motion that people perceive as appropriate for the speech.
Results show that a degradation in any parameter was viewed negatively, but
some changes, such as hand shape, are more impactful than others. A video
summarization can be found at https://youtu.be/aw6-_5kmLjY.Comment: To be published in the Proceedings of the 20th ACM International
Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 20
Investigating How Speech And Animation Realism Influence The Perceived Personality Of Virtual Characters And Agents
The portrayed personality of virtual characters and agents is understood to influence how we perceive and engage with digital applications. Understanding how the features of speech and animation drive portrayed personality allows us to intentionally design characters to be more personalized and engaging. In this study, we use performance capture data of unscripted conversations from a variety of actors to explore the perceptual outcomes associated with the modalities of speech and motion. Specifically, we contrast full performance-driven characters to those portrayed by generated gestures and synthesized speech, analysing how the features of each influence portrayed personality according to the Big Five personality traits. We find that processing speech and motion can have mixed effects on such traits, with our results highlighting motion as the dominant modality for portraying extraversion and speech as dominant for communicating agreeableness and emotional stability. Our results can support the Extended Reality (XR) community in development of virtual characters, social agents and 3D User Interface (3DUI) agents portraying a range of targeted personalities
Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation
This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any productâs acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion
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