Multi-party interaction in a virtual meeting room

R. Rienks, D. Heylen, J. Zwiers, R. op den Akker and A. Nijholt

HMI, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

State of the art in computer graphics, embodied agents, inverse kinematics and other areas allow us to build realistic 3D virtual environments in which real humans can meet virtual human-like avatars. The Human Media Interaction group of the University of Twente has a tradition in research in computer graphics for virtual environments (VEs), research in interaction with embodied conversational agents and machine learning techniques for recognition of higher level features (like dialogue acts, gestures, emotions) from lower level features (like: words, hand arm movements, facial display elements). We have constructed a 3D virtual replica of one of the meetings rooms that is used for data collection of meetings in the AMI project. This VMR is useful for various applications, that can be grouped into: data visualization (data can be direct from recordings of behaviors in real meetings or output by some machine model that induces features from collected data; but one could also think of a 3D summary of real meetings); as an (immersive) virtual environment and communication means for real time remote meeting participation; research in human perception, recognition, and interpretation of data. VEs give control over various independent factors and can be used to study how they influence measurable features of behavior. In this presentation we will discuss these research applications..

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2005 , 5^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

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