Towards Communication with Virtual Humans

Abstract

Virtual reality technology enables interaction with computer-simulated en-vironment and applying realism in computer generated 3D graphics. It is a demanding technology in several elds such as medicine, education, business and commerce, heritage, defense and military which use virtual reality as visualization systems, training simulations and entertainment applications. Realism is one of the major requirement of those VR applications which is still a challenging topic in VR domain. Realism of computer-simulated environments is built up using quality graphics, applying physics theories and providing real world experiences to user when he is within the virtual environment. Autonomous behavior of virtual environment also supports producing immersive experience to users and thus intimates realism. Virtual communities are a revolutionary invention of virtual reality domain. Natural interaction with virtual humans and autonomous behavior of virtual humans intimates realism in virtual communities. A natural user interfaces make nat-ural interactions between user and virtual community. Expensive hardware and tracking devices are some of hindrances to create natural user interface. These virtual communities can be used in human training systems, learn-ing systems and social science applications. Then we propose that through a quality communication between real and virtual human may improve the e ectiveness of these systems. So such factors motivate us to contribute an approach to interact with virtual humans in natural way with inexpensive devices and thus improve quality of communication. Main objective of this work is improving immersive experience and realism in virtual communities where user has to interact with virtual humans. We have provided natural user interface to grab the attention of virtual human which the user needs to interact. The proposed system is integrated with a head mounted display, headphones and a computer-simulated environment. The outcome of this work is grabbing virtual humans attention for starting a conversation. To achieve this target we use user gaze which is simpli ed to head direction and voice. As a response virtual human would understand request of real human and then turns towards him. A cost bene cial head tracking approach is presented which uses one web camera and four color LEDs placed on head. And the results which based on user study show that this novel approach for interacting in virtual communities is more e ective and immersive than using tradition virtual reality input tools used in desktop systems.