Visual Similarity for Socially Interactive Agents that Support Self-Awareness

ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), pp. 1–3

Abstract

Self-awareness is a critical factor in social interaction. Teachers being aware of their own emotions and thoughts during class may enable reflection and behavioral change. While inducing self-awareness through mirrors or video is common in face-to-face training, it has been scarcely examined in digital training with virtual avatars. This paper examines the relationship between avatar visual similarity and inducing self-awareness in digital training environments. We developed a theory-based methodology to reliably manipulate perceptually relevant facial features of digital avatars based on human-human identification and emotional predisposition. Manipulating these features allows to create personalized versions of digital avatars with varying degrees of visual similarity.

Authors 6

1. Claudio Silva

   Saarland University

   Affiliation as printed

   Universitat des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany

2. Bernhard Hilpert Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

3. Chirag Bhuvaneshwara

   German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence

   Affiliation as printed

   German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany

4. Patrick Gebhard

   German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence

   Affiliation as printed

   German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany

5. Fabrizio Nunnari

   German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence

   Affiliation as printed

   German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany

6. Dimitra Tsovaltzi

   German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence

   Affiliation as printed

   German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany