Course info

HCID-314 Virtual Humans and Social Interactions 2.5 ECTS

HCID-315 Virtual Humans and Social Interactions project 2.5 ECTS  

Coordinators: J-C. Martin

Students: M1 & M2 (HCI & EIT Digital)

Social interactions are becoming increasingly important in Human-Computer Interactions. Many systems involve virtual characters endowed with social interaction capabilities and the possibility to display non verbal expressions such as facial expressions, gaze and gestures (video games, virtual worlds, virtual e-coaches for health applications, animation, digital arts, pedagogical agents, on-line assistants, virtual patients for training doctors). 

This module presents research in modeling, animating, and rendering realistic and expressive autonomous virtual humans. It introduces the theoretical foundations of multimodal communication in relation with theories and models from Psychology that are adapted to inform the design of computational models of interactive and expressive virtual humans. 

This includes theories, models and software architectures for managing emotions, personality, facial expressions, gestures and bodily interactions. Design frameworks, software architectures and integration of these social dimensions in HCI design are presented. Applications in relevant fields of multimodal and social interaction are presented as use cases: virtual coaches and persuasive technologies for sport, physical activities, nutrition, stress management, personal and corporate well being ; pedagogical agents for training social skills. On-going PhD theses on Virtual Humans are presented.

The module is organised as interactive sessions. Regular hands-on sessions are organised and involve a platform for designing 3D interactive virtual agents (MS Windows). Homework includes: reading scientific articles, watching relevant TED like videos about fundamentals and applications of social interaction and virtual humans design. 

Project: a general topic is provided (eg. virtual human for eCoaching) over which students (by groups of 2 or 3) have to design and implement an interactive virtual human and report their progress by the step-by-step writing of a scientific article (tips are provided on how to write a scientific article). Feedback is provided by the teacher all along the project.