Title: Animating Virtual Humans to improve trust, co-presence and embodiment

Abstract: The metaverse is rapidly evolving as a new playground for interacting and collaborating with other autonomous agents or avatars controlled by other users. In the real world, there are many aspects of nonverbal behavior and appearance, that influence the way we communicate and build trust with others. Since most communication in the metaverse will be through virtual humans, there is a need to understand how different aspects of these virtual avatars can affect the quality of such interactions and allow us to build trust and enhance co-presence. In this talk, I will focus on simulation and animation aspects that play a critical role in creating engaging virtual humans in VR. I will cover both simulation and animation of groups of autonomous agents interacting with the user, as well as self-avatars representing the user. When interacting with with a group of agents, I will show how incorporating collision beliefs, audio, or vibro-tactile feedback can enhance co-presence and the overall plausibility of the virtual experience. When it comes to our self-avatar, animation quality and multi-sensory feedback can affect embodiment, task performance, and even change our own body image.  Finally, I will present some motion reconstruction techniques that can take advantage of current AI trends to provide high quality animation even with few tracking sensors.

Affiliation: Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain

Bio: Nuria Pelechano is an Associate Professor at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain, where she is a member of the Research Center for Visualization, Virtual Reality and Graphics Interaction (ViRVIG). She is the president of the Eurographics Spanish Chapter, and member of the Sociedad Científica Española de Informática (SCIE). She has co-authored two books on Crowd Simulation and has published in journals and conferences on computer graphics and animation. She has participated in projects funded by the EU (currently MSCA ITN-ETN CLIPE, and HORIZON-101093159-XR4ED), Spanish Government (currently SENDA: TED2021-129761B-I00, PID2021-122136OB-C21), and USA institutions, and also worked on technology transfer projects regarding crowd evacuation, and applications of Virtual Reality for architecture design. Her research interests include simulation, animation and rendering of crowds, generation of navigation meshes, and studying human-avatar interaction in Virtual Reality.

Title: Social agents and non-verbal interactions: realism of virtual agents’ motion and validity of immersive interactions

Abstract: Non-verbal communication is an important channel for social interactions between humans, that is used to convey information to others, or to perceive information from them through, for instance, body motion, posture, proximity, or gaze cues. This is typically the case when pedestrians navigate public spaces: they have to perceive the relative movements of their neighbors and to interpret their intentions in order to safely reach a goal while avoiding any collisions with them. Modeling such a situation is complex since human social interactions are multifactorial by nature and include social norms, situational and individual factors. In this context, studying nonverbal communication has not only fundamental applications to the understanding of social interactions, but also to the design and the simulation of populated environments where a user is interacting with virtual social agents. In this talk, I will first discuss the multiple factors that have been studied in the literature impacting the level of realism of animated virtual agents, including the features that have been manipulated as well as the evaluation approaches that have been developed. Then, I will specifically focus on the validity of virtual reality to preserve realistic non-verbal interactions, and its value to the design of controlled situations to go further in the understanding of such non-verbal interactions. I will conclude my talk with the ongoing challenges and future directions of creating and evaluating realistic immersive non-verbal interactions.

Affiliation: INRIA University Rennes 2, France

Bio: Anne-Hélène Olivier is an associate professor and a co-director of the master program in adapted physical activity at the University of Rennes 2, in France. She is a researcher scientist at the Movement Sports and Health (M2S) laboratory and in the VirtUs team at Inria. She received her PhD in Sports Sciences (Biomechanics) in 2008 (Univ. Rennes) where her project focuses on the analysis and modeling of human walking and of interactions between pedestrians. During her post-doc fellowship at Inria, she was interested in the interactions between real and virtual walkers, and especially the evaluation of VR to study such interactions. Her current research interests concern both the understanding of non-verbal interactions between people, but also the use of the knowledge about human behavior to improve the design of navigation techniques and populated virtual environments. To this end, she uses an experimental approach both in real and virtual conditions and develops collaborative work within a multidisciplinary research team. She has served as a conference scientific papers chair for the international conferences IEEE VR 2019 (conf. track), EuroVR 2020, ISMAR 2021 and 2023 (conf. track) and SAP 2021. She is one of the co-general chair of IEEE VR 2025.