1. CAN INTERACTING WITH A VIRTUAL HUMAN MAKE YOU A BETTER PERSON? BENJAMIN LOK, PH.D. UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA ISVC 2011, September 28 th, 2011

2. Virtual Environment Fidelity Virtual Iraq, USC, ICT

3. Virtual Environment Fidelity Ford Vehicle Simulator

4. Virtual Environment Fidelity Flatworlds, USC, ICT

5. Goal of Talk  Virtual environments have high fidelity Flatworlds, USC, ICT Virtual Iraq, USC, ICT Ford Vehicle Simulator

6. Goal of Talk  I propose the next area of VR and computer graphics research will focus on virtual humans  How virtual humans affect people  How people are using virtual humans  Research directions of virtual humans  Motivate you to explore virtual humans in your own research Image courtesy of Skip Rizzo, University of Southern California

7. Example Virtual Human Interaction  Video courtesy of Skip Rizzo, University of Southern California

8. Can interacting with a virtual human make you a better person? Dr. Gregory House Good with medical knowledge Not so good with interacting with people Dr. Doug Ross Good with medical knowledge Good with interacting with people Dr. Derek Shepherd Good with medical knowledge Good with interacting with people

9. Expanding applicability of simulation  Humans are social creatures  Virtual humans impact us in a fundamentally differently way than virtual environments  Virtual humans enable computer graphics and virtual reality to be applied to new areas

10. This talk will focus on  Virtual humans as interaction partners  How can they affect us?  Teach us?  Change us?

11. Deployment - Continuum of Experiences Virtual Worlds Immersive Interaction Video Conference Chat Web Browser Instant Message Mobile Deployment Immersion Images from www.virtualpatientsgroup.com Fidelity, Learning efficacy

12. Commercial Virtual Humans Up – Pixar

13. Commercial Virtual Humans L. A. Noire – Rockstar Games

14. Affect: Bias  Would health profession students treat these virtual human patients differently? Images from the Virtual Patients project at verg.cise.ufl.edu

15. Affect: Paranoia Images courtesy of Mel Slater, University of Barcelona

16. Affect: Social Facilitation  Zanbaka, ICAT 2004

17. Affect: Phobia treatment  Fear of public speaking (Pertaub 2002, Virtually Better)

18. Affect: Emotions and Ethics

19. Affect: Social norms  What would you do if she sneezed?

20. Pixels mean different things  What do you see?

21. Training  Think of tasks that everyone does almost everyday…  Interact with another person  Yet training for this is very limited.  Humans are social creatures!

22. How do people train to interact with others?  Lectures  Human resources training  Case studies  Videos  Role-play  With other students, instructors, actors  Actors -> gold standard for many fields Medicine Military

23. Training with a VH  Impacts  Education (teachers with students)  Military (leadership training)  Law Enforcement (police officers and suspects) Justine Cassell – Carnegie Mellon University, USC ICT

24. Real change in behavior

25. Would you be influenced more by? Baylor & Plant 2005

26. Benefits of Virtual Humans?  Providing experiences is logistically complex  Frequency  Standardization  Diversity  Feedback  Resources Military Version Sexual Assault Patient Prototype Image courtesy of Skip Rizzo, University of Southern California

27. Benefits of Virtual Humans?  Abnormal findings

28. New research areas  Visual realism  Haptics  Cognition  Personality  What would it take to make people care  VR notions of presence and immersion do not directly apply Image courtesy of Justine Cassell, Carnegie Mellon University

29. Future Implications Revolutionize interpersonal training – Culture – Communication Skills Help people with communication skills deficiencies – Fear of public speaking – Social phobias (e.g. paranoia) – Autism – Bias Images courtesy of Sabarish Babu – Clemson University

30. Companies are starting up!  Shadow Health.com  Alelo.com

31. So Can Virtual Humans Make You a Better Person?  If you want them to, we know they can  Affect you  You can learn from interacting them  Change your behavior

32. We can do a better job to  Expose others to our new findings and technology  How many people have tried out your innovations?  There is a hunger out there!

33. Virtual People Factory  www.virtualpeoplefactory.com www.virtualpeoplefactory.com  Web-based interface to virtual humans  Deployed Early 2008  56 active developers  2700 users  105,000 utterances  Demo Demo

34. Mobile Distribution of Simulation  Deploy simulations via mobile platforms  Android app, released December 2010, over 4600 downloads In Android Market, search for “Virtual Patient” Image from www.virtualpatientsgroup.com

35. Museum of Science and Industry  Science museum in Tampa, FL  Integrate a VH interaction  Public health literacy  Research  About 4000 people per year enter our exhibit  About n=~400 per year are usable datapoints for studies

36. Repositories  MedEdPORTAL  Peer reviewed medical education resource  400 institutions downloads in 10 months

37. Play Video Games  Wii mote, Kinect, 3D Displays, Large displays, smartphones  People are leveraging VR technologies  They would benefit from our research  We must be willing to adapt

38. Social Network, Read Engadget  Embrace these communities  Or risk obsolescence  Our students already are, our collaborators are beginning to  Leverage social networks distributions  E.g. Johnny Lee wiimote (15 million views)  How many google citations are a “seminal paper” Rendering equation – google scholar 1480.  Justin Bieber – 630 million views

39. I hope this talk motivated you to…  Explore virtual humans in your research  As a community, have more people interact with your research  Embrace the new wave of technology to interact and distribute  Inspire people outside this room

40. Thank You! Build your own virtual patients: www.virtualpatientsgroup.comwww.virtualpatientsgroup.com Contact: lok@cise.ufl.edu Support: National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health