Uncertainty cues are inherent in natural human interaction, as they signal to communication partners how much they can rely on conveyed information. Humans subconsciously provide such signals both verbally (e.g., through expressions such as “maybe’’ or “...

Gaze and laughter play a crucial role in managing miscommunication and coordinating social interactions. We hypothesise that models of laughter and gaze coordination in human dialogue extend to virtual entities. This paper describes methodology of the ...

For avatars - virtual bodys controlled by a human - an established visualization is to display incomplete visualizations, e.g. only head and torso. However, the preference for the body visibility of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) - fully computer ...

This workshop discusses how interactive, multimodal technology, such as virtual agents, can measure and train social-affective interactions. Sensing technology now enables analyzing users’ behaviors and physiological signals. Various signal processing ...

Client-centered counseling, in which individuals are prompted to talk about their behavior, is the standard treatment for Alcohol misuse. However, open-ended conversations with virtual agent counselor raise potential safety concerns if the agent ...

Music is a great way of supporting a story. It adds a new layer of affective information and as such substantially increases the listening experience in storytelling scenarios. However, in real-time settings, creating emotionally fitting music requires ...

The social context of a situation is crucial for people to decide how to behave and interact. For artificial agents to be truly socially interactive and unobtrusive it is equally important to understand the social context of a situation. Training these ...

Human social interactions rely on multisensory cues. In this regard, visual and auditory cues are paramount during the initiation of an interaction. In this preliminary work, we propose an approach to let Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) simulating ...

Motivational agents are virtual agents that seek to motivate users by providing feedback and guidance. Prior work has shown how certain factors of an agent, such as the type of feedback given or the agent's appearance, can influence user motivation when ...

This paper presents the initial results of a study exploring whether the perceived rapport with a virtual agent can influence users' decisions on delegating critical tasks to the agent. We hypothesize that users are more likely to delegate to virtual ...

Taking turns in a conversation is a delicate interplay of various signals, which we as humans can easily decipher. Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) communicating with humans should leverage this ability for smooth and enjoyable conversations. ...

Virtual agents (VAs) can be used in a variety of scenarios, e.g. as assistants or in exergame tutorials. One of the advantages of VAs is that they can be customized to the user’s needs. Still, little research is done on preferences for the appearance of ...

Nonverbal communication is paramount in daily life, as well as in populated virtual reality (VR) environments. In this paper, we focused on gaze behaviour, which is key to initiate and drive social interactions. Previous work on photographs and on ...

Implementing gender-neutral virtual agents seems to be one possible solution to the problem of designing technologies which do not represent and convey gender stereotypes. Three tests were structured with the intention of selecting faces of male, ...

Virtual agents interact with each other through dialogues in various types of narratives (e.g. narrative films). In this paper, we propose an approach on the basis of DialoGPT pre-trained language model, which explores the impact of dialogue generation ...

Recent advances in visualisation technologies have opened up new possibilities for human-agent communication. For systems where agents use automated planning, visualisation of agent intentions, i.e., agent planned actions, can assist human understanding ...

Avatar robots can help people extend their physical, cognitive, and perceptual capabilities, allowing people to exceed time and space constraints. In that sense, avatar robots can greatly influence people's lives. However, we have many challenges to be ...

Social motor coordination is an important mechanism responsible for creating shared understanding but can be a challenge for Autistic individuals. Social virtual reality (VR) provides an opportunity to create a safe and inclusive environment for which ...

Abstract

Perspective-taking, which enables people to imagine another’s thinking and goals, is known to be effective for promoting prosocial behaviors in human-computer interactions. However, most previous studies have focused on simulating human-human ...

Automatic synthesis of realistic co-speech gestures is an increasingly important yet challenging task in artificial embodied agent creation. Previous systems mainly focus on generating gestures in an end-to-end manner, which leads to difficulties in ...