avatar Papers

This paper investigates the impact of contradictory emotional content on people’s ability to identify the emotion expressed on avatar faces as compared to human faces. Participants saw emotional faces (human or avatar) coupled with emotional texts. The face and text could either display the same or different emotions. Participants were asked to identify the emotion on the face and in the text. While they correctly identified the emotion on human faces more often than on... Read more

Virtual communities such as Second Life and Entropia Universe are quickly becoming the next frontier of cybercrime. With GDPs of virtual economies of persistent worlds approaching billions of dollars it is necessary to develop tools for protection of virtual environments similar to those utilized to secure real world’s infrastructure, such as biometrics security systems. The first step in the development of such security methodologies is wide availability of datasets necessary for training and... Read more

This paper presents recent work on the addition of emotions and affective behaviour to robotic avatars within Second Life, as part of continuing research and development in the area of interactive agents for games and simulations. The development is based upon the E-AI architecture [1] which is a proposed computational model of emotions intended to be used by developers who already have their own agent AI systems. In this work, the E-AI architecture was applied to... Read more

This report documents the work done for the Technology Strategy Board feasibility study Applying Techniques from Intelligent Robotics to Autonomous Avatars in Virtual Worlds. At a high level this project can be seen as taking theories and technologies developed for building intelligent robots that interact with humans and their surroundings [5, 16] and investigating how they operate in Second Life (SL).The following section describes the background to the project in more detail, then subsequent sections detail the work... Read more

Unlike computer games where Non-Player-Character avatars are common, in most virtual worlds they are the exception. Deploying an embodied AI into a virtual world offers a unique opportunity to evaluate embodied AIs, and to develop them within an environment where human and computer are on almost equal terms. This paper presents an architecture being used for the deployment of chatbot driven avatars within the Second Life virtual world, looks at the challenges of deploying an... Read more

In realistic looking game environments it is important that virtual characters behave naturally. Our goal is to produce naturally looking gaze behavior for animated agents and avatars that are simply idling. We studied people standing and waiting, as well as people walking down a shopping street. From our observations we built a demo with the CADIA Populus multi-agent social simulation platform. Read more

Avatars are frequently used in virtual worlds and online games to convey emotions across cultures. However, our previous study suggested there are cultural differences in recognizing avatar's facial expressions [1]. Yuki et al.'s study using emoticons and photorealistic human face images suggests Americans tend to interpret emotions based on the mouth, while Japanese tend to focus on the eyes [2]. Inspired by Yuki's study, this study uses cartoonish avatar faces to find cultural differences in... Read more

This paper describes the design and training of an agent that helps users navigate in Second Life (SL), a massively multi-player online game environment.SL allows users to create a virtual avatar and explore areas constructed by other users.With the increasing number of places to visit it is difficult for a user to explore all the places.The built-in keyword search mechanism is fairly limited and users typically find new places through personal exploration or tips from... Read more

The JISC-funded PREVIEW project aims to develop problem-based learning (PBL) scenarios in Second Life (SL) for distance-learning healthcare students. One of the target courses - a Paramedic course run by the joint faculty of St George’s University of London and Kingston University – uses PBL that is based upon a ‘virtual patient’ model. In order to keep scenarios as sustainable and portable as possible we adopted the MedBiquitous VP Standard – or MVP - designed for... Read more

The literature has demonstrated that sorting through the mass of information available on the Internet is time consuming and sometimes imparts misinformation. In this context, the tendency to customize the content of Web pages by interactive tools will soon become a standard in the development of retailer websites. A new form of customization of the information is emerging in the apparel industry: an avatar (i.e. virtual model) that reflects the consumer’s body. The goal of... Read more