HCC: Building Rapport with Virtual Humans

和谐一直被认为是理解成功的帮助关系和解释人际关系发展所必需的核心结构之一，如果不是核心的话。通过对人类和虚拟(基于计算机的)人类的系统实验，该项目试图通过更仔细地观察同步(即过程夹带)来加深对融洽背后的因素的理解。这项研究将使用具有情感表现力的虚拟人，这些虚拟人对参与者的(I)呼吸模式、(Ii)面部特征和凝视跟踪以及(Iii)光流做出反应。如果“单边夹带”(从人类到虚拟人类)产生融洽的社会后果，它将极大地简化界面代理设计，消除复杂的感知和匹配行为生成的需要。或者，它可能会助长某些不受欢迎的社会属性--无能、怨恨和厌恶--这可能与应用程序的目标相冲突。本项目研究的是人机交互和虚拟主体设计中的这一基本问题。这项技术有可能促进在人与虚拟人之间建立融洽关系，并实现更广泛的社会期望结果，包括改进计算机中介学习和健康干预措施。由于融洽是一种关键的社会调节因素，在需要教学或说服的各种环境中被发现会影响结果，这项研究可以为谈判、冲突解决和文化意识领域的虚拟培训的发展提供信息。最后，这个项目具有广泛的传播潜力，因为融洽关系本质上是跨学科的，涉及社会心理学、商业、传播和计算机科学等领域。

Rapport has been argued to be one of the central, if not the central, constructs necessary to understanding successful helping relationships and to explaining the development of personal relationships. Through systematic experimentation with humans and virtual (computer-based) humans, this project seeks to deepen understanding of the factors underlying rapport by looking more closely at the synchronization (i.e., process entrainment). The research will employ emotionally expressive virtual humans that are responsive to human participants' (i) respiratory patterns, (ii) facial feature and gaze tracking, and (iii) optical flow. If "unilateral entrainment" (of humans to virtual humans) produces rapport-like social consequences, it would greatly simplify interface agent design, obviating the need for sophisticated sensing and generation of matching behavior. Alternatively, it may promote certain undesirable social attributions -- incompetence, resentment, and dislike -- that could conflict with the goals of the application. This project investigates this fundamental question for human-computer interaction and virtual agent design. This technology has the potential to facilitate the establishment of rapport between humans and virtual humans and to achieve the broader range of socially desirable consequences including improved computer-mediated learning and health interventions. As rapport is a key social moderator found to influence outcomes in a variety of settings that require teaching or persuasion, this research could inform the development of virtual training in the areas of negotiation, conflict resolution and cultural awareness. Finally, this project has broad dissemination potential given that rapport is inherently interdisciplinary, involving the domains of social psychology, business, communication and computer science.