Social Touch in Human-agent Interactions in an Immersive Virtual Environment

International audienceWorks on artificial social agents, and especially embodied conversational agents, have endowed them with social-emotional capabilities. They are being given the abilities to take into account more and more modalities to express their thoughts, such as speech, gestures, facial expressions, etc. However, the sense of touch, although particularly interesting for social and emotional communication, is still a modality widely missing from interactions between humans and agents. We believe that integrating touch into those modalities of interaction between humans and agents would help enhancing their channels of empathic communication. In order to verify this idea, we present in this paper a system allowing tactile communication through haptic feedback on the hand and the arm of a human user. We then present a preliminary evaluation of the credibility of social touch in human-agent interaction in an immersive environment. The first results are promising and bring new leads to improve the way humans can interact through touch with virtual social agents

I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions

By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language, gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and quantitative evaluation sessions demonstrated the technical feasibility of the system whilst uncovering a number of deficits in its capacity to engage users in a way that would be perceived as natural and emotionally engaging. We argue that naturalness should not always be seen as a desirable goal and suggest that deliberately suppressing the naturalness of virtual human interactions, such as by altering its personality cues, might in some cases yield more desirable results.Comment: eNTERFACE16 proceeding

Video prototyping of dog-inspired non-verbal affective communication for an appearance constrained robot

Original article can be found at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org “This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.”This paper presents results from a video human-robot interaction (VHRI) study in which participants viewed a video in which an appearance-constrained Pioneer robot used dog-inspired affective cues to communicate affinity and relationship with its owner and a guest using proxemics, body movement and orientation and camera orientation. The findings suggest that even with the limited modalities for non-verbal expression offered by a Pioneer robot, which does not have a dog-like appearance, these cues were effective for non-verbal affective communication

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion