Keeping up stories: design considerations for a police interview training game

This discussion paper presents ideas for designing a serious game for tutoring \ud police officers in training to conduct non-cooperative dialogue in police interviews. The system teaches social interactions. It simulates the social interactions of suspects in police interviews through a virtual suspect agent. These interactions can be non-cooperative as suspects are often not cooperating during the interview. The police officer in training has to interact with the suspect in a way that makes the suspects cooperative in order to gather information from them. In addition, the system must track the progress of the user regarding the training goals. We propose an architecture with a meta-agent that adjusts the suspect agent to present the user with challenging and meaningful interactions, while maintaining a consistent story and immersive game experience

The multimodal EchoBorg:: Not as smart as it looks

In this paper we present a Multimodal Echoborg interface to explore the effect of different embodiments of an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) in an interaction. We compared an interaction where the ECA was embodied as a virtual human (VH) with one where it was embodied as an Echoborg, i.e, a person whose actions are covertly controlled by a dialogue system. The Echoborg in our study not only shadowed the speech output of the dialogue system but also its non-verbal actions. The interactions were structured as a debate between three participants on an ethical dilemma. First, we collected a corpus of debate sessions with three humans debaters. This we used as baseline to design and implement our ECAs. For the experiment, we designed two debate conditions. In one the participant interacted with two ECAs both embodied by virtual humans). In the other the participant interacted with one ECA embodied by a VH and the other by an Echoborg. Our results show that a human embodiment of the ECA overall scores better on perceived social attributes of the ECA. In many other respects the Echoborg scores as poorly as the VH except copresence

Dynamics of social positioning patterns in group-robot interactions

When a mobile robot interacts with a group of people, it has to consider its position and orientation. We introduce a novel study aimed at generating hypotheses on suitable behavior for such social positioning, explicitly focusing on interaction with small groups of users and allowing for the temporal and social dynamics inherent in most interactions. In particular, the interactions we look at are approach, converse and retreat. In this study, groups of three participants and a telepresence robot (controlled remotely by a fourth participant) solved a task together while we collected quantitative and qualitative data, including tracking of positioning/orientation and ratings of the behaviors used. In the data we observed a variety of patterns that can be extrapolated to hypotheses using inductive reasoning. One such pattern/hypothesis is that a (telepresence) robot could pass through a group when retreating, without this affecting how comfortable that retreat is for the group members. Another is that a group will rate the position/orientation of a (telepresence) robot as more comfortable when it is aimed more at the center of that group

Agents united:An open platform for multi-agent conversational systems

The development of applications with intelligent virtual agents (IVA) often comes with integration of multiple complex components. In this article we present the Agents United Platform: an open source platform that researchers and developers can use as a starting point to setup their own multi-IVA applications. The new platform provides developers with a set of integrated components in a sense-remember-think-act architecture. Integrated components are a sensor framework, memory component, Topic Selection Engine, interaction manager (Flipper), two dialogue execution engines, and two behaviour realisers (ASAP and GRETA) of which the agents can seamlessly interact with each other. This article discusses the platform and its individual components. It also highlights some of the novelties that arise from the integration of components and elaborates on directions for future work

Record, transform & reproduce social encounters in immersive VR: an iterative approach

Immersive Virtual Reality Environments that can be accessed through multimodal natural interfaces will bring new affordances to mediated interaction with virtual embodied agents and avatars. Such interfaces will measure, amongst others, users' poses and motion which can be copied to an embodied avatar representation of the user that is situated in a virtual or augmented reality space shared with autonomous virtual agents and human controlled or semi-autonomous avatars. Designers of such environments will be challenged to facilitate believable social interactions by creating agents or semi-autonomous avatars that can respond meaningfully to users' natural behaviors, as captured by these interfaces.\ud In our future research, we aim to realize such interactions to create rich social encounters in immersive Virtual Reality. In this current work, we present the approach we envisage to analyze and learn agent behavior from human-agent interaction in an iterative fashion. We specifically look at small-scale, `regulative' nonverbal behaviors. Agents inform their behavior on previous observations, observing responses that these behaviors elicit in new users, thus iteratively generating corpora of short, situated human-agent interaction sequences that are to be analyzed, annotated and processed to generate socially intelligent agent behavior. Some choices and challenges of this approach are discussed

Single Value Devices

We live in a world of continuous information overflow, but the quality of information and communication is suffering. Single value devices contribute to the information and communication quality by focussing on one explicit, relevant piece of information. The information is decoupled from a computer and represented in an object, integrating into daily life. The contribution of this paper is on different levels: first, we identify the class of single value devices, and, second, illustrate it by examples in a survey. Third, we collect the characterisations of single value devices in a taxonomy. The taxonomy provides also a collection of design choices allowing to find new combinations or alternatives more easily, and facilitating the design of new, meaningful, effective and working objects. Finally, when we want to step from experimental and conceptual examples to commercialisable products a number of issues become relevant that are identified and discussed in this paper

Interacting with Virtual Agents in Shared Space: Single and Joint Effects of Gaze and Proxemics

The Equilibrium Theory put forward by Argyle and Dean, posits that in human-human interactions, gaze and proxemic behaviors work together in establishing and maintaining a particular level of intimacy. This theory has been evaluated and used in Virtual Reality settings where people interact with Virtual Humans. In this study we disentangle the single and joint effects of proxemic and gaze behavior in this setting further, and examine how these behaviors affect the perceived personality of the agents. We simulate a social encounter with Virtual Humans in immersive Virtual Reality. Gaze and proxemic behaviors of the agents are manipulated dynamically while the participants’ gaze and proxemic responses are being measured. As could be expected, participants showed strongest gaze and proxemic responses when agents manipulated both at the same time. However, agents that only manipulated gaze elicited weaker responses compared to agents that only manipulated proxemics. Agents that exhibited more directed gaze and reduced interpersonal distance were attributed higher scores on intimacy related items than agents that exhibited averted gaze and increased interpersonal distance

Who Makes Your Heart Beat? What Makes You Sweat? Social Conflict in Virtual Reality for Educators

Though educators often deal with stressful social conflicts, many face them ad hoc without much training. We studied if and how virtual agents can help University staff manage student-teacher conflicts. We explored educators' verbal, behavioral, and physiological reactions to a virtual agent that brought up a student-teacher conflict and held exit-interviews. Our qualitative analysis revealed that virtual agents for conflict training were positively received, but not for conflict mediation with cross-cultural differences. Those with non-Western backgrounds felt that an agent could help “save face,” whereas Westerners preferred to resolve conflicts in person. In line with this, participants with a Western background rated the virtual agent to be less competent compared to those with non-Western backgrounds. While physiological measures only allow for limited conclusions, we found that participants who believed that the agent was controlled by a human had higher normalized hear rate variability (for the entire conversation in total) than people who thought that the agent was autonomous. We discuss implications for implementing virtual agents for training purposes, the impact of physiological signals, and the need to consider cultural and individual differences