Cristina

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Del curso dictado por University of London

Building Interactive 3D Characters and Social VR

21 calificaciones

University of London

Building Interactive 3D Characters and Social VR

21 calificaciones

Curso 4 de 5 en SpecializationVirtual Reality

Meeting another person is one of the most amazing experiences you can have in Virtual Reality. It is quite unlike communicating through any other medium except a real life face-to-face conversation. Because the other person is life size and shares a virtual space with you, body language works in a way that cannot be done on a flat screen. This course will enable you to create realistic social interactions in VR. You will learn about both the psychology of social interaction and the practical skills to implement it in Unity3D. We will take you through the basics of 3D character animation and how to create body language. You will learn about how to make characters that can respond to players’ speech and body language. You will also learn about avatars: the virtual representation of other players, and agents: computer controlled NPC characters and how to implement both of them. As many people have said before us, social is the future of VR. This course will help you become part of the future of Virtual Reality social experiences.

De la lección

Introduction to Virtual Characters

In this module you will start to learn about the role of human-like characters in VR. Characters can represent other real people: avatars, or they can be computer controlled: agents. Either way they are the very foundation of social interaction in VR.

Introduction to Social VR and Virtual Characters5:09

Virtual Characters | Realism5:56

Agents and Avatars5:25

Applications of Virtual Characters11:59

Introduction to Character Animation3:00

Designing Virtual Characters7:38

Conoce a los instructores

Dr Sylvia Xueni Pan
Lecturer, Department of Computing
Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Marco Gillies
Senior Lecturer
Computing Department, Goldsmiths, University of London

It's hard to believe that it has been over a decade

since the two of us started working together.

One of the first major projects we worked on together

was developing an interactive agent

to use in some of our VR experiments.

We called it Cristina.

We'd like to talk a little bit about the challenges we faced

and how we solve them because a lot of it is still relevant today.

Cristina was able to carry on a conversation with a real person who was immersed in VR.

Her graphical appearance wasn't great even by the standard of that time.

But what made her interesting was that

her body language was quite realistic

and most important of all,

it responded to the participant.

Speech interaction isn't easy now but back then it was a big challenge.

Getting a character to respond realistically with dialogue was beyond what we could do.

Because Cristina was going to be used for experiments

where they'd always be an experiment to present,

we decided to use the approach called Wizard of Oz.

Essentially, we faked interactive conversation

by having in an experimenter choose

what Cristina was going to say from a number of options

in a menu just like the Wizard in the book.

On the other hand, this wouldn't work for a lot of the body language.

Her body language responds to other people very quickly.

The experimenter wouldn't be able to choose gestures and movements quickly enough.

Also, we mostly do body language subconsciously

so we aren't really aware of what we're doing.

That means it is very hard to explicitly control it for a character.

So, we decided to automate a lot of the body language

that involves sensing the behavior of the participant

and producing realistic responses.

The sensors we had available are very similar to

what we have now and head-mounted displays,

a head tracker and a microphone.

The most important information we needed to know

was whether Cristina was speaking or listening.

Speaking was easy when the experimenter pressed a button,

we just played back a particular piece of speech until we finished.

The audio we recorded an actress reading the script.

We then hand animated body and facial animations to go with the audio.

Our software played back the audio and animations

together to make Cristina speak and gesture.

Living experiments with motion captured actors

as they read out the lines and used that animation

which gave more realistic results.

Listening behavior was if anything more important.

It created the illusion that Cristina

was really paying attention to the participant

and made her feel real.

We used the microphone to detect whether the participant was speaking or not.

And when they were speaking,

our software would occasionally playback

nods and smiles to give some friendly encouragement.

Cristina's eyes were also very important.

We had a simple automatic gaze animation

where she would alternate

between looking at the participant and looking away.

Importantly, we change the proportion of time

she was looking depending on

whether she was speaking or listening.

She looked a lot more while listening to show attention.

This has proven to be quite effective.

Take a look at this video clip and please pay attention to his body language.

That shirt looks great on you.

How much was it?

I think it was about 20 pounds, it was quite cheap.

Thank you very much though.

You look very nice too.

Oh, thank you very much.

Here, the participant was clearly enjoying the interaction very much.

So much so that he moved all the way to the back wall

of the cave in order to get closer to Cristina.

What he didn't know was that

we have also programmed Cristina

to maintain a social distance from him.

So, the closer he moved,

therefore the back Christina moved.

She would move to make sure that she was always

at a comfortable distance to the participant.

Cristina would always turn to the face of the participant

as you would naturally do in a conversation.

And in one experiment,

we reduced the distance midway

through the conversation making her move forward

and increasing the sense of intimacy.

This had a strong emotional impact on our participants.

So, Cristina had quite realistic body language

and had a strong impact on participants

using only a few simple rules

that you can't reproduce with current VR technology.

The rest of this course is going to explain

how to do some of these things

and create socially skilled virtual characters.

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