Nonverbal communication in virtual reality: Nodding as a social signal in virtual interactions

Nonverbal communication is an important part of human communication, including head nodding, eye gaze, proximity and body orientation. Recent research has identified specific patterns of head nodding linked to conversation, namely mimicry of head movements at 600 ms delay and fast nodding when listening. In this paper, we implemented these head nodding behaviour rules in virtual humans, and we tested the impact of these behaviours, and whether they lead to increases in trust and liking towards the virtual humans. We use Virtual Reality technology to simulate a face-to-face conversation, as VR provides a high level of immersiveness and social presence, very similar to face-to-face interaction. We then conducted a study with human-subject participants, where the participants took part in conversations with two virtual humans and then rated the virtual character social characteristics, and completed an evaluation of their implicit trust in the virtual human. Results showed more liking for and more trust in the virtual human whose nodding behaviour was driven by realistic behaviour rules. This supports the psychological models of nodding and advances our ability to build realistic virtual humans

Exploring Language Pedagogy with Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence

The manuscript and video of the presentation are available online at https://diglib.eg.org/xmlui/handle/10.2312/cgvc20231201Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Virtual Reality (VR) is a highly immersive and interactive experience that renders users to be engrossed in a 3D virtual environment. The recent technological advancements with high-resolution headset display, and accurate tracking of six degrees of freedom paired with controllers allow life-like renditions of real-world scenarios as well as fictional scenarios without potential environmental risks. This paper explores the usage of Virtual Reality in education by incorporating current pedagogical approaches into an interactive 3D virtual environment. The focus of this study revolves around language pedagogy, in specific, the tool developed allows teach users fundamental Mandarin Chinese. This educational VR application enables users to practice their reading and writing skills through a calligraphy lesson and engages users in a listening and speaking lesson through natural conversation. To achieve an organic dialogue, phrases spoken by the user in a lesson are validated immediately through an intuitive phrase recognition system developed using machine learning. The developed prototype has undergone testing to ensure its efficacy. An initial investigation into this prototype found that the majority of participants were supportive of this concept and believe that it would improve the engagement of digital education

Nonverbal communication in virtual reality: Nodding as a social signal in virtual interactions

Nonverbal communication is an important part of human communication, including head nodding, eye gaze, proximity and body orientation. Recent research has identified specific patterns of head nodding linked to conversation, namely mimicry of head movements at 600 ms delay and fast nodding when listening. In this paper, we implemented these head nodding behaviour rules in virtual humans, and we tested the impact of these behaviours, and whether they lead to increases in trust and liking towards the virtual humans. We use Virtual Reality technology to simulate a face-to-face conversation, as VR provides a high level of immersiveness and social presence, very similar to face-to-face interaction. We then conducted a study with human-subject participants, where the participants took part in conversations with two virtual humans and then rated the virtual character social characteristics, and completed an evaluation of their implicit trust in the virtual human. Results showed more liking for and more trust in the virtual human whose nodding behaviour was driven by realistic behaviour rules. This supports the psychological models of nodding and advances our ability to build realistic virtual humans

Combining wearable fNIRS and immersive virtual reality to study preschoolers’ social development: a proof-of-principle study on preschoolers’ social preference

Data availability: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.Supplementary data is available online at: https://academic.oup.com/oons/article/doi/10.1093/oons/kvad012/7475300?login=false#433457515 .Copyright © The Author(s) 2023. A child’s social world is complex and rich, but has traditionally been assessed with conventional experiments where children are presented with repeated stimuli on a screen. These assessments are impoverished relative to the dynamics of social interactions in real life, and can be challenging to implement with preschoolers, who struggle to comply with strict lab rules. The current work meets the need to develop new platforms to assess preschoolers’ social development, by presenting a unique virtual-reality set-up combined with wearable functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). As a proof-of-principle, we validated this platform by measuring brain activity during self-guided social interaction in 3-to-5-year-olds, which is under-investigated, yet crucial to understand the basis of social interactions in preschoolers. 37 preschoolers chose an interaction partner from one of 4 human-like avatars of different gender and age. We recorded spontaneous brain fluctuations from the frontal and temporoparietal regions (notably engaged in social-categorization and preference) while children played a bubble-popping game with a preferred and an assigned avatar. 60% of the participants chose to play with the same-gender and same-age avatar. However, this result was driven by females (>80% vs. 50% in males). Different fronto-temporoparietal connectivity patterns when playing with the two avatars were observed, especially in females. We showed the feasibility of using a novel set-up to naturalistically assess social preference in preschoolers, which was assessed at the behavioural and functional connectivity level. This work provides a first proof-of-principle for using cutting-edge technologies and naturalistic experiments to study social development, opening new avenues of research.Leverhulme Trust and undertaken at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck College, London. C.B. acknowledges support from the Early Career Fellowship Leverhulme Trust (ECF-2021-174). P.P. acknowledges support from the Wellcome Trust (212979/Z/18/Z). E.J.H.J. acknowledges support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/R009368/1) and from the Medical Research Council (MR/K021389/1; MR/T003057/1

DropSPH: ISPH Simulation of Droplet Interactions with a Solid Surface

Electronic Conference Materials for all tracks at Eurographics 2023 (Full Papers, Short Papers, STARs, Tutorials, Posters, Education Papers) are available in the EG Digital Library, available at: https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/2633296. Conference Materials are marked with the EG23 Conference Logo for easy access.Copyright © 2023 The Authors. We present a physically-based model to simulate droplet behaviours when impacted on a solid surface. Our model creates the coalescence, spreading, and break-up deformations that occur when a liquid droplet collides with a solid surface. We model the attraction-repulsion forces within an improved free surface Incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (ISPH) framework that includes contact force and cohesion force between particles. The results show that our model is effective in simulating several small-scale liquid phenomena.Brunel University London BRIEF Award 2022/23 Ref: 12495106, TSDroplet: An Interactive 3D Tool for Simulating Droplet–Solid Interactions

Virtual Reality current trends and proposed research

Among the hottest fields in Information Technology, together with AI/Machine Learning and Blockchain, just to name of couple more, Virtual Reality (as well as Augmented Reality and Extended Reality) are gaining momentum all the more every day. This is mainly because it is heavily applicable on a broad range of business and scientific domains reshaping the way human activities are done now and leaving promises for the near and far future. This short review study aims to provide some insights on the status of the main aspects of VR and some challenges to address as well as provide some possible research directions for anyone interested to delve into the field

What are the restraint practices, preferences, and experiences when Australian parents travel with their children in a rideshare vehicle?

This study aimed to explore the preferences, experiences and restraint practices of Australian parents travelling with their children in rideshare vehicles. Six hundred and thirty-one participants completed an online survey (M = 39.2 years, SD = 10.5, Range = 18.0–70.0 years; Female: 63.4%). Most participants (59.1%) reported that they had not travelled in a rideshare vehicle with their youngest child (M = 7.2 years, SD = 5.2, Range = 0.0–17.0 years; Male: 54.2%). Participants who reported that they have travelled with their youngest child in a rideshare vehicle tended to: be younger, identify as male, have completed an Undergraduate or Postgraduate degree, reside in the Australian Capital Territory, earning a higher yearly household income, and were involved in an at-fault crash in the past two years. In addition, these participants were: less likely to have a ‘younger’ youngest child, less likely to ‘always’ wear a seatbelt while travelling in their private motor vehicle, and also less likely to ‘always’ restrain their child in an appropriate restraint while travelling in their private motor vehicle. Prohibitive reasons for not travelling in a rideshare vehicle included: cost (29.3%), concerns over driver safety (27.5%), concerns over travelling with children in a rideshare service (24.8%), or inconvenience (24.3%). Participants who reported that they had travelled in a rideshare vehicle with their youngest child reported lower rates of appropriate restraint use within the rideshare vehicle (57.3%) than when travelling in their private motor vehicle (85.6%). Reasons associated with inappropriate restraint use within the rideshare vehicle included: unavailability of a child restraint (39.6%), travelling a short distance (33.0%), were not required to use one in this situation (33.0%), or the parent did not have a restraint with them (26.4%). Given the increasing popularity of rideshare services in Australia, and globally, the urgent adaption of rideshare-specific policy, legislation, education, and design in relation to child restraint requirements is needed to ensure the safety of child occupants

Implementing a new platform to test empathy in toddlers with wearable fNIRS in freely moving set-up

Presented during: poster session - Wednesday 2A (Virtual), Wednesday, June 08, 2022: 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM. Poster No: WTh1051; Presented During: Poster Session - Wednesday Wednesday, June 22, 2022: 12:45 PM - 01:45 PM; Presented During: Poster Session - Thursday Thursday, June 23, 2022: 12:45 PM - 01:45 PM. Available online at: https://ww3.aievolution.com/hbm2201/index.cfm?do=abs.viewAbs&abs=2724.Leverhulme Trust early career fellowshi