Abstract

Social interaction defines who we are, and our relationships are tied to our strongest emotions. However, social interaction can be stressful, and mistakes in high-stakes situations can lead to serious consequences. In this talk, I will discuss how we use virtual humans in virtual reality to improve real-world outcomes in healthcare, wellbeing, and education. I will share our work in creating meaningful social interactions across different paradigms and scenarios, and discuss future directions for virtual human research in XR. 

Bio

Prof Sylvia Pan is a Professor of Virtual Reality at Goldsmiths, University of London. She co-leads the SeeVR research lab including 10 academics and researchers. She holds a PhD in Virtual Reality, and an MSc in Computer Graphics, both from UCL, and a BEng in Computer Science from Beihang University.  Her research interest is the use of Virtual Reality as a medium for real-time social interaction, in particular in the application areas of medical training and therapy. Her work has been featured multiple times in the media, including BBC Horizon, the New Scientist magazine, and the Wall Street Journal. Her 2017 Coursera VR specialisation attracted over 100,000 learners globally, and she co-leads on the MA/MSc in Virtual and Augmented Reality at Goldsmiths Computing.