Editorial: Simulating virtual humans and crowds for virtual reality
Funda Durupinar
Nuria Pelechano
Mar Gonzalez-Franco- 1Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, United States
- 2Computer Science Department, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
- 3Microsoft Research (United States), Redmond, WA, United States
Editorial on the Research Topic
Simulating virtual humans and crowds for virtual reality
Virtual humans, both in the form of autonomous agents and human-controlled avatars, constitute a core part of immersive experiences in VR. Collaborative spaces populated with real and artificial humans have enormous potential to provide insights into human behavior/psychology and improve simulation models.
Early work on virtual humans addressed the technical issues of modeling and animating characters in real-time (Granieri & Badler, 1994) and pioneered today’s characters with a rich repertoire of behaviors. Such behaviors elicit social presence, namely “the sense of being with one another” (Biocca et al., 2003), and help enhance user engagement and performance (Takács, 2005). Since then, virtual humans have started playing significant roles as therapists, interviewers, audience members or pedagogical agents to help alleviate distress or overcome phobias (Pertaub et al., 2002; Batrinca et al., 2013; Morbini et al., 2014; Kahlon et al., 2019). In addition to providing standardization, virtual humans have advantages over real humans as they can exhibit infinite patience, uphold pedagogical guidelines and provide objective and consistent feedback without being burdened by social complications (Mell & Gratch, 2015). Furthermore, people treat and communicate with virtual humans naturally as if they were real humans (Patterson et al., 2002; Nass & Reeves, 2003; de Borst & de Gelder, 2015; Slater et al., 2019).
This Research Topic brings together original research articles that explore the roles of virtual humans in various social situations and the impact of their realism on their perception and effectiveness. Multiple studies show that virtual humans can effectively use persuasion strategies similar to real people (André et al., 2011; Dai & MacDorman, 2018) and be as persuasive as real people (Bickmore et al., 2009; Dai & MacDorman, 2018). The first article on this Research Topic (Dai & MacDorman) applies this knowledge to the healthcare domain. The authors explore how virtual physicians’ realism and bedside manner affect patients’ adherence intention to diet and exercise, predicting behavior change. The article presents an online virtual consultation study, where participants act as diabetic patients and interact with a virtual physician. The physician is depicted in different styles of realism and eeriness, acting with low or high warmth. The results indicate that although eeriness was conveyed as intended, it did not affect the patients’ adherence intention and behavior change. On the other hand, the virtual doctor’s perceived warmth was linked to increased physical activity.
The second article (Rogers et al., 2022) also investigates the effect of avatar realism on social interactions in VR. The authors classify avatars in terms of their graphical realism and interaction dynamics complexity into three categories: basic avatars, semi-realistic avatars, and realistic motion avatars. Their premise is that realistic motion avatars can help enhance presence in VR as they can capture subtle details of motion, thus communicating more information. The article presents a study comparing VR-based social interactions with realistic motion avatars to analogous face-to-face interactions to support their argument. The scenarios include a casual introductory conversation and a semi-structured interview where participants disclose negative and positive experiences. Results of the study suggest that although participants indicated a preference for face-to-face interactions, their ratings showed no significant differences between face-to-face and VR interactions. An especially important finding is that some participants preferred VR when they had to disclose negative experiences.
The third article (Glémarec et al., 2022) focuses on virtual audiences, benefiting from the controlled setting that VR provides for social skills training. The article introduces a virtual audience control system and a behavior model that uses pedagogical strategies to modulate the affective state of the speaker by controlling the virtual audience’s attitudes. The system was designed in a user-centered fashion, incorporating pedagogical narratives according to expert feedback. With user studies involving undergraduate students in a scientific presentation seminar, the authors collected data on the virtual audience believability, system usability, and acceptability. The results indicate that all the participants agreed on the environment’s ecological validity and pedagogical promise.
The articles in this collection contribute to unraveling the potential that virtual humans offer in various areas, including education, healthcare, and casual conversations. We hope the collection provides a helpful reference for the state-of-the-art immersive systems involving virtual humans.
Author contributions
FD wrote the manuscript. NP and MG-F reviewed the manuscript and provided comments and suggestions. All the authors read and approved the submitted version.
Conflict of interest
MG-F was employed by Microsoft Research.
The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
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References
André, E., Bevacqua, E., Heylen, D., Niewiadomski, R., Pelachaud, C., Peters, C., et al. (2011). “Non-verbal persuasion and communication in an affective agent,” in Emotion-oriented systems: The humaine handbook. Editors R. Cowie, C. Pelachaud, and P. Petta (Heidelberg, Germany: Springer Berlin Heidelberg), 585–608.
Batrinca, L., Stratou, G., Shapiro, A., Morency, L.-P., and Scherer, S. (2013). Cicero - towards a multimodal virtual audience platform for public speaking training. Proc. Intelligent Virtual Agents 8108, 116–128.
Bickmore, T. W., Pfeifer, L. M., and Paasche-Orlow, M. K. (2009). Using computer agents to explain medical documents to patients with low health literacy. Patient Educ. Couns. 75 (3), 315–320. doi:10.1016/j.pec.2009.02.007
Biocca, F., Harms, C., and Burgoon, J. K. (2003). Toward a more robust theory and measure of social presence: Review and suggested criteria. Presence. (Camb). 12 (5), 456–480. doi:10.1162/105474603322761270
Dai, Z., and MacDorman, K. F. (2018). The doctor’s digital double: How warmth, competence, and animation promote adherence intention. PeerJ Comput. Sci. 4, e168. doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.168
de Borst, A. W., and de Gelder, B. (2015). Is it the real deal? Perception of virtual characters versus humans: An affective cognitive neuroscience perspective. Front. Psychol. 6, 576. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00576
Granieri, J., and Badler, N. I. (1994). Simulating humans in VR. Virtual reality and its applications.
Kahlon, S., Lindner, P., and Nordgreen, T. (2019). Virtual reality exposure therapy for adolescents with fear of public speaking: A non-randomized feasibility and pilot study. Child. Adolesc. Psychiatry Ment. Health 13, 47. doi:10.1186/s13034-019-0307-y
Morbini, F., DeVault, D., Georgila, K., Artstein, R., Traum, D., and Morency, L.-P. (2014). A demonstration of dialogue processing in SimSensei kiosk. Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), Philadelphia, June 2014. doi:10.3115/v1/w14-4334
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Slater, M., Neyret, S., Johnston, T., Iruretagoyena, G., CrespoÀlvarez, M., Alabèrnia-Segura, M., et al. (2019). An experimental study of a virtual reality counselling paradigm using embodied self-dialogue. Sci. Rep. 9 (1), 10903–10913. doi:10.1038/s41598-019-46877-3
Keywords: virtual humans and avatars, virtual audience, virtual physicians, avatar realism, social virtual reality
Citation: Durupinar F, Pelechano N and Gonzalez-Franco M (2022) Editorial: Simulating virtual humans and crowds for virtual reality. Front. Virtual Real. 3:999335. doi: 10.3389/frvir.2022.999335
Received: 20 July 2022; Accepted: 28 July 2022;
Published: 23 August 2022.
Edited and reviewed by:
Ronan Boulic, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, SwitzerlandCopyright © 2022 Durupinar, Pelechano and Gonzalez-Franco. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Funda Durupinar, funda.durupinarbabur@umb.edu