Look me in the eyes: A survey of eye and gaze animation for virtual agents and artificial systems

International audienceA person's emotions and state of mind are apparent in their face and eyes. As a Latin proverb states: "The face is the portrait of the mind; the eyes, its informers.". This presents a huge challenge for computer graphics researchers in the generation of artificial entities that aim to replicate the movement and appearance of the human eye, which is so important in human-human interactions. This State of the Art Report provides an overview of the efforts made on tackling this challenging task. As with many topics in Computer Graphics, a cross-disciplinary approach is required to fully understand the workings of the eye in the transmission of information to the user. We discuss the movement of the eyeballs, eyelids, and the head from a physiological perspective and how these movements can be modelled, rendered and animated in computer graphics applications. Further, we present recent research from psychology and sociology that seeks to understand higher level behaviours, such as attention and eye-gaze, during the expression of emotion or during conversation, and how they are synthesised in Computer Graphics and Robotics

Perception-driven approaches to real-time remote immersive visualization

In remote immersive visualization systems, real-time 3D perception through RGB-D cameras, combined with modern Virtual Reality (VR) interfaces, enhances the user’s sense of presence in a remote scene through 3D reconstruction rendered in a remote immersive visualization system. Particularly, in situations when there is a need to visualize, explore and perform tasks in inaccessible environments, too hazardous or distant. However, a remote visualization system requires the entire pipeline from 3D data acquisition to VR rendering satisfies the speed, throughput, and high visual realism. Mainly when using point-cloud, there is a fundamental quality difference between the acquired data of the physical world and the displayed data because of network latency and throughput limitations that negatively impact the sense of presence and provoke cybersickness. This thesis presents state-of-the-art research to address these problems by taking the human visual system as inspiration, from sensor data acquisition to VR rendering. The human visual system does not have a uniform vision across the field of view; It has the sharpest visual acuity at the center of the field of view. The acuity falls off towards the periphery. The peripheral vision provides lower resolution to guide the eye movements so that the central vision visits all the interesting crucial parts. As a first contribution, the thesis developed remote visualization strategies that utilize the acuity fall-off to facilitate the processing, transmission, buffering, and rendering in VR of 3D reconstructed scenes while simultaneously reducing throughput requirements and latency. As a second contribution, the thesis looked into attentional mechanisms to select and draw user engagement to specific information from the dynamic spatio-temporal environment. It proposed a strategy to analyze the remote scene concerning the 3D structure of the scene, its layout, and the spatial, functional, and semantic relationships between objects in the scene. The strategy primarily focuses on analyzing the scene with models the human visual perception uses. It sets a more significant proportion of computational resources on objects of interest and creates a more realistic visualization. As a supplementary contribution, A new volumetric point-cloud density-based Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) metric is proposed to evaluate the introduced techniques. An in-depth evaluation of the presented systems, comparative examination of the proposed point cloud metric, user studies, and experiments demonstrated that the methods introduced in this thesis are visually superior while significantly reducing latency and throughput

Expressive social exchange between humans and robots

Thesis (Sc.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-264).Sociable humanoid robots are natural and intuitive for people to communicate with and to teach. We present recent advances in building an autonomous humanoid robot, Kismet, that can engage humans in expressive social interaction. We outline a set of design issues and a framework that we have found to be of particular importance for sociable robots. Having a human-in-the-loop places significant social constraints on how the robot aesthetically appears, how its sensors are configured, its quality of movement, and its behavior. Inspired by infant social development, psychology, ethology, and evolutionary perspectives, this work integrates theories and concepts from these diverse viewpoints to enable Kismet to enter into natural and intuitive social interaction with a human caregiver, reminiscent of parent-infant exchanges. Kismet perceives a variety of natural social cues from visual and auditory channels, and delivers social signals to people through gaze direction, facial expression, body posture, and vocalizations. We present the implementation of Kismet's social competencies and evaluate each with respect to: 1) the ability of naive subjects to read and interpret the robot's social cues, 2) the robot's ability to perceive and appropriately respond to naturally offered social cues, 3) the robot's ability to elicit interaction scenarios that afford rich learning potential, and 4) how this produces a rich, flexible, dynamic interaction that is physical, affective, and social. Numerous studies with naive human subjects are described that provide the data upon which we base our evaluations.by Cynthia L. Breazeal.Sc.D

What do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About Human-Robot Interaction?

This is a collection of papers presented at the workshop What Do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About HRI , held at the 2010 Human-Robot Interaction Conference, in Osaka, Japan

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 product’s 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

Final Report to NSF of the Standards for Facial Animation Workshop

The human face is an important and complex communication channel. It is a very familiar and sensitive object of human perception. The facial animation field has increased greatly in the past few years as fast computer graphics workstations have made the modeling and real-time animation of hundreds of thousands of polygons affordable and almost commonplace. Many applications have been developed such as teleconferencing, surgery, information assistance systems, games, and entertainment. To solve these different problems, different approaches for both animation control and modeling have been developed

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography, supplement 200

This bibliography lists 204 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in November 1979

Aerospace Medicine and Biology: Cumulative index, 1979

This publication is a cumulative index to the abstracts contained in the Supplements 190 through 201 of 'Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A Continuing Bibliography.' It includes three indexes-subject, personal author, and corporate source

Virtual Reality

At present, the virtual reality has impact on information organization and management and even changes design principle of information systems, which will make it adapt to application requirements. The book aims to provide a broader perspective of virtual reality on development and application. First part of the book is named as "virtual reality visualization and vision" and includes new developments in virtual reality visualization of 3D scenarios, virtual reality and vision, high fidelity immersive virtual reality included tracking, rendering and display subsystems. The second part named as "virtual reality in robot technology" brings forth applications of virtual reality in remote rehabilitation robot-based rehabilitation evaluation method and multi-legged robot adaptive walking in unstructured terrains. The third part, named as "industrial and construction applications" is about the product design, space industry, building information modeling, construction and maintenance by virtual reality, and so on. And the last part, which is named as "culture and life of human" describes applications of culture life and multimedia-technology

Persuasive interactive non-verbal behaviour in embodied conversational agents

Realism for embodied conversational agents (ECAs) requires both visual and behavioural fidelity. One significant area of ECA behaviour, that has to date received little attention, is non-verbal behaviour. Non-verbal behaviour occurs continually in all human-human interactions, and has been shown to be highly important in those interactions. Previous research has demonstrated that people treat media (and therefore ECAs) as real people, and so non-verbal behaviour is also important in the development of ECAs. ECAs that use non-verbal behaviour when interacting with humans or other ECAs will be more realistic, more engaging, and have higher social influence. This thesis gives an in-depth view of non-verbal behaviour in humans followed by an exploration of the potential social influence of ECAs using a novel Wizard of Oz style approach of synthetic ECAs. It is shown that ECAs have the potential to have no less social influence (as measured using a direct measure of behaviour change) than real people and also that it is important that ECAs have visual feedback on their interactants for this social influence to maximised. Throughout this thesis there is a focus on empirical evaluation of ECAs, both as a validation tool and also to provide directions for future research and development. Present ECAs frequently incorporate some form of non-verbal behaviour, but this is quite limited and more importantly not connected strongly to the behaviour of a human interactant. This interactional aspect of non-verbal behaviour is important in human-human interactions and results from the study of the persuasive potential of ECAs support this fact mapping onto human-ECA interactions. The challenges in creating non-verbally interactive ECAs are introduced and by drawing corollaries with robotics control systems development behaviour-based architectures are presented as a solution towards these challenges, and implemented in a prototypical ECA. Evaluation of this ECA using the methodology used previously in this thesis demonstrates that an ECA with non-verbal behaviour that responds to its interactant is rated more positively than an ECA that does not, indicating that directly measurable social influences will be possible with further development