Virtual Humans
The University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies seems to be involved in a lot of really interesting virtual reality and avatar research. I’ve included an example of what they’re working on below:
Sergeant Star
The video below shows a demonstration of USC’s Sergeant Star Immersive Demonstration. The avatar is life-sized, and they say that they incorporated Hollywood storytelling techniques. Normally I would just interpret that to mean that they spent extra effort to make the storyline compelling and engaging, but since Paul Debevec, their associate director for graphics research, recently won an Academy Award, I will have to assume that they really did leverage Hollywood writers for this project! The use of natural language understanding and virtual gestures should also add to the imersive experience. One of the goals of this project is to explore the viability of using holographic imagery to provide a more natural sense of space. Sounds like we’re entering the infancy stage of the Star Trek Holodeck. I think the life-like scale of the avatar lends itself extremely well to providing a properly immersive environment. I’m interested to know if there is any research comparing the size of a virtual avatar with subjective ratings of immersion, engagement, and even affect.
