Non-Verbal Behaviour of a VR Agent Playing a Board Game

Imagine a scenario where you are playing a board-game within a virtual environment. In this environment, you are playing against another player. This player can converse with you, show emotions and give you the feeling of playing against a real person. This project builds on a final project done by three Bachelor students at Reykjavik University called the Virtual General Game Playing Agent. In their project a user can play against a virtual player that makes his moves based, among other things, his personality and shows non-verbal behaviour such as looking at the user and showing impatience. The focus of this project is to increase the believability of the agent, by improving its non-verbal expression capabilities during a board-game. This was done by collecting and analysing real human behaviour data as well as adding options for complex expressions by incorporating a morphable 3D character model. To collect data, volunteers were recorded while they were playing a board-game. The recordings were then annotated in regards to behaviour type such as eye gaze and actions such as hand movement in relation to the board-game. A tool was created to analyse the data, summarizing both how often each behaviour occurs and how long it lasts as well as analysing co-occurrence of annotation belonging to separate types (co-occurrence of behaviour with action). Finally, a data-driven module was created and added to the agent. The data module uses the analysed data when generating and selecting behaviour. At the moment it only uses the module to generate and select gaze behaviour when making a move. The results showed that out of 12 distinct behaviours evaluated the mean duration of each behaviour of the new agent was closer to the real data in 7 of them and the existing agent in 5. With this work, we are closer to our scenario even though much work is still to be done.

Author dc:creator

• Guðrún Inga Baldursdóttir 1987-

Contributors dc:contributor

• Háskólinn í Reykjavík

• Tölvunarfræði
• Meistaraprófsritgerðir
• Sýndarveruleiki
• Líkamstjáning
• Computer science
• Virtual reality
• Body language

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1946/31277

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:skemman.is:1946/31277