Do You See What Eyes See? Implementing Inattentional Blindness

This paper presents a computational model of visual attention incorporating a cognitive imperfection known as inattentional blindness. We begin by presenting four factors that determine successful attention allocation: conspicuity, mental workload, expectation and capacity. We then propose a framework to study the effects of those factors on an unexpected object and conduct an experiment to measure the corresponding subjective awareness level. Finally, we discuss the application of a visual attention model for conversational agents

Comparing and Evaluating Real Time Character Engines for Virtual Environments

As animated characters increasingly become vital parts of virtual environments, then the engines that drive these characters increasingly become vital parts of virtual environment software. This paper gives an overview of the state of the art in character engines, and proposes a taxonomy of the features that are commonly found in them. This taxonomy can be used as a tool for comparison and evaluation of different engines. In order to demonstrate this we use it to compare three engines. The first is Cal3D, the most commonly used open source engine. We also introduce two engines created by the authors, Piavca and HALCA. The paper ends with a brief discussion of some other popular engines

Using Virtual Agents to Guide Attention in Multi-task Scenarios

Kulms P, Kopp S. Using Virtual Agents to Guide Attention in Multi-task Scenarios. In: Aylett R, Krenn B, Pelachaud C, Shimodaira H, eds. Intelligent Virtual Agents. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol 8108. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg; 2013: 295-302

Gaze Behaviors for Virtual Crowd Characters

Nowadays, crowds of virtual characters are used in many domains such as neurosciences, psychology, and computer sciences. Since as human beings, we are natural experts in human being representation and movement, it makes it that much harder to correctly model and animate virtual characters. This becomes even more challenging when considering crowds of virtual characters. Indeed, in addition to the representation and animation, there is the mandatory trade-off between rich, realistic behaviors and computational costs. In this paper, we present a crowd engine, to which we introduce and extra layer which allows its characters to produce gaze behaviors. We thus enhance crowd realism by allowing the characters composing it to be aware of their environment and other characters and/or a user