HCC: Building Rapport with Virtual Humans

融洽关系被认为是理解成功的互助关系和解释个人关系发展所必需的核心要素之一，如果不是核心要素的话。通过对人类和虚拟（基于计算机的）人类的系统实验，该项目试图通过更密切地观察同步（即过程卷入）来加深对关系的潜在因素的理解。该研究将使用情感表达的虚拟人，这些虚拟人对人类参与者的(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“单边卷入”（游戏邦注：即人类与虚拟人类之间的互动）能够产生类似于人际关系的社交结果，那么它将极大地简化界面代理的设计，从而避免复杂的感知和匹配行为的生成。或者，它可能会促进某些不受欢迎的社会归因——无能、怨恨和厌恶——这可能与应用程序的目标相冲突。这个项目研究了人机交互和虚拟代理设计的基本问题。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理想后果，包括改进以计算机为媒介的学习和保健干预。由于融洽关系是一个关键的社会调节因素，在各种需要教学或说服的环境中影响结果，本研究可以为谈判、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、通信和计算机科学领域。

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.