Comparing interpersonal interactions with a virtual human to those with a real human (original) (raw)

Interpersonal Scenarios: Virtual approx Real?

2006

Abstract This paper reports on a study to examine the similarities and differences in experiencing an interpersonal scenario with real and virtual humans. A system that allows medical students to interview a life-size virtual patient using natural speech and gestures was used as a platform for this comparison. Study participants interviewed either a virtual patient or a standardized patient, an actor trained to represent a medical condition.

Leveraging Virtual Humans to Effectively Prepare Learners for Stressful Interpersonal Experiences

2013

Stressful interpersonal experiences can be difficult to prepare for. Virtual humans may be leveraged to allow learners to safely gain exposure to stressful interpersonal experiences. In this paper we present a between-subjects study exploring how the presence of a virtual human affected learners while practicing a stressful interpersonal experience. Twenty-six fourth-year medical students practiced performing a prostate exam on a prostate exam simulator. Participants in the experimental condition examined a simulator augmented with a virtual human. Other participants examined a standard unaugmented simulator. Participants reactions were assessed using self-reported, behavioral, and physiological metrics. Participants who examined the virtual human experienced significantly more stress, measured via skin conductance. Participants stress was correlated with previous experience performing real prostate exams; participants who had performed more real prostate exams were more likely to experience stress while examining the virtual human. Participants who examined the virtual human showed signs of greater engagement; non-stressed participants performed better prostate exams while stressed participants treated the virtual human more realistically. Results indicated that stress evoked by virtual humans is linked to similar previous real-world stressful experiences, implying that learners real-world experience must be taken into account when using virtual humans to prepare them for stressful interpersonal experiences.

The validity of a virtual human experience for interpersonal skills education

2007

Abstract Any new tool introduced for education needs to be validated. We developed a virtual human experience called the Virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (VOSCE). In the VOSCE, a medical student examines a life-size virtual human who is presenting symptoms of an illness. The student is then graded on interview skills. As part of a medical school class requirement, thirty three second year medical students participated in a user study designed to determine the validity of the VOSCE for testing interview skills.

Virtual human patients for training of clinical interview and communication skills

2008

Although schools commonly make use of standardized patients to teach interview skills, the diversity of the scenarios standardized patients can characterize is limited by availability of human actors. Virtual Human Agent technology has evolved to a point where researchers may begin developing mental health applications that make use of virtual reality patients. The work presented here is a preliminary attempt at what we believe to be a large application area. Herein we describe an ongoing study of our virtual patients. We present an approach that allows novice mental health clinicians to conduct an interview with virtual character that emulates 1) an adolescent male with conduct disorder; and 2) an adolescent female who has recently been physically traumatized.

Lessons Learned in Assessing Human-Virtual Human Interaction

2012

To avoid the “file drawer effect ” of unreported null results, we report on an experimental study in assessing humanvirtual human interaction. In this study, participants were asked to spend about ten minutes with a projected lifesized virtual human. The virtual human interacted with the participants by speaking to them and exhibited three different tones of voice and facial expressions corresponding to a happy, sleepy, or grumpy personality. The virtual human asked participants to help her with a visual memory task where they responded, via keyboard, to a series of question sets about various pictures. We hypothesized that the virtual human’s personality will have an effect on the amount of time participants are willing to help the virtual human on a task. In the results of our preliminary experiment, the personality of the virtual human had no effect on interaction time. First, we summarize the study and results, next we discuss some of the probable causes of our results, and fina...

Using Virtual Humans to Bootstrap the Creation of Other Virtual Humans

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010

Virtual human (VH) experiences are increasingly used for training interpersonal skills such as military leadership, classroom education, and doctor-patient interviews. These diverse applications of conversational VHs have a common and unexplored thread -a significant additional population would be afforded interpersonal skills training if VHs were available to simulate either interaction partner. We propose a computer-assisted approach to generate a virtual medical student from hundreds of interactions between a virtual patient and real medical students. This virtual medical student is then used to train standardized patients -human actors who roleplay the part of patients in practice doctor-patient encounters. Practice with a virtual medical student is expected to lead to greater standardization of roleplay encounters, and more accurate evaluation of medical student competency. We discuss the method for generating VHs from an existing corpus of human-VH interactions and present observations from a pilot experiment to determine the utility of the virtual medical student for training.

Virtual Humans and Social Interaction

Abstract We thought that, virtual reality cannot merely be reduced to a hardware system, another way to achieve the optimal experience, is to produce a sense of immersion associated to an emotional and social experience inside the virtual environment. We believe that Virtual Characters that express a social and emotional behavior in their interaction could produce a sense of immersion in the user that interact with them. We propose to use this kind of character to develop social and emotional interfaces, capable to produce a believable Social Interaction.

Conversations with a virtual human: Synthetic emotions and human responses

2014

To test whether synthetic emotions expressed by a virtual human elicit positive or negative emotions in a human conversation partner and affect satisfaction towards the conversation, an experiment was conducted where the emotions of a virtual human were manipulated during both the listening and speaking phase of the dialogue. Twenty-four participants were recruited and were asked to have a real conversation with the virtual human on six different topics. For each topic the virtual human’s emotions in the listening and speaking phase were different, including positive, neutral and negative emotions. The results support our hypotheses that (1) negative compared to positive synthetic emotions expressed by a virtual human can elicit a more negative emotional state in a human conversation partner, (2) synthetic emotions expressed in the speaking phase have more impact on a human conversation partner than emotions expressed in the listening phase, (3) humans with less speaking confidence also experience a conversation with a virtual human as less positive, and (4) random positive or negative emotions of a virtual human have a negative effect on the satisfaction with the conversation. These findings have practical implications for the treatment of social anxiety as they allow therapists to control the anxiety evoking stimuli, i.e., the expressed emotion of a virtual human in a virtual reality exposure environment of a simulated conversation. In addition, these findings may be useful to other virtual applications that include conversations with a virtual human.

User Perceptions of a Virtual Human Over Mobile Video Chat Interactions

Human-Computer Interaction. Novel User Experiences

We believe that virtual humans, presented over video chat services, such as Skype, and delivered using smartphones, can be an effective way to deliver innovative applications where social interactions are important, such as counseling and coaching. To explore this subject, we have built a hardware and software apparatus that allows virtual humans to initiate, receive, and interact over video calls using Skype or any similar service. With this platform, we conducted two experiments to investigate the applications and characteristics of virtual humans that interact over mobile video. In Experiment 1, we investigated user reactions to the physical realism of the background scene in which a virtual human was displayed. In Experiment 2, we examined how virtual characters can establish and maintain longer term relationships with users, using ideas from Social Exchange Theory to strengthen bonds between interactants. Experiment 2 involved repeated interactions with a virtual human over a period of time. Both studies used counseling-style interactions with users. The results demonstrated that males were more attracted socially to a virtual human that was presented over a realistic background than a featureless background while females were more socially attracted to a virtual human with a less realistic featureless background. The results further revealed that users felt the virtual human was a compassionate partner when they interacted with the virtual human over multiple calls, rather than just a single call.

Exploring Interaction Strategies for Virtual Characters to Induce Stress in Simulated Job Interviews

Job interviews come with a number of challenges, especially for young people who are out of employment, education, or training (NEETs). This paper presents an approach to a job training simulation environment that employs two virtual characters and social cue recognition techniques to create an immersive interactive job interview. The two virtual characters are created with different social behavior profiles, understanding and demanding, which consequently influences the level of difficulty of the simulation as well as the impact on the user. Finally, we present a user study which investigates the feasibility of the proposed approach by measuring the effect the different virtual characters have on the users.