ITR: Using Virtual Environment Technology to Understand and Augment Social Interaction

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This project focuses on facilitating and augmenting social interaction in virtual environments, particularly immersive virtual environments. Virtual environment technology allows individuals to freely move about digital "worlds" in real time observing and interacting with the environment and virtual others within it. Increased sophistication of virtual environment technology and digital imaging of people promises a new age for technologically mediated social interaction of geographically separated individuals. However, in order to implement such interaction virtually in meaningful and productive ways, an understanding of the parameters of people's perceptions of each other's non-verbal signals (e.g., facial expressions, gestures, gaze) within virtual environments is necessary. Such an understanding will provide a hierarchical taxonomy of the necessary and sufficient non-verbal signals that are critical to social interaction within virtual environments and, therefore, must be tracked and rendered among interactions in virtual environments. Realizing the objectives of the proposed project will advance scientific understanding in the areas of social interaction and non-verbal behavior, human participation in collaborative virtual environments, and technological (e.g., computer vision) aspects of automated tracking and rendering of human on-verbal signals.