Visual and Behavioural Fidelity of Virtual Humans with Applications to Bystander Intervention in Violent Emergencies

该项目的目的是显着提高沉浸式社交虚拟环境（伊韦斯）的质量。通过“质量”，我们指的是参与者对虚拟社交情境的反应，特别是他们对他们所感知的现实反应的程度。我们所说的“反应”是指每一个可测量的水平，从无意识的生理过程（如皮肤电活动或心率变异性的变化）到明显的行为，情绪和认知反应/包括他们在采访中报告的主观心理状态。通过社交伊韦斯，我们具体指的是其中一个或多个人类参与者在社交定义的上下文中与虚拟人形角色（化身）交互的应用。具体来说，我们的目标是改善交互角色的视觉外观和他们的交互行为，特别是使他们的行为适当地响应参与者的行为。第三，社会伊韦斯将被构建，在社会心理学文献中得到充分研究，并具有重要的社会意义，被称为暴力紧急情况下的旁观者行为，如街头暴力。最后，这些虚拟社会的情况下，将被用于一系列的实验研究，以测试这些目标是否确实提高这些社会伊韦斯中的参与者的反应质量，我们的目标之一是利用我们的研究在社会上有用的应用，从而也有助于越来越多的研究机构，使用虚拟环境作为一个实验室的社会心理学研究。我们特别考虑了莱文和他在兰开斯特的同事们关于暴力紧急情况下旁观者行为的研究项目。这个研究项目重新审视了社会心理学中经典的“旁观者效应”。旁观者效应表明，紧急事件的目击者越多，单个旁观者干预的可能性就越小。这一现象被确定为1964年在纽约发生的基蒂·吉诺维斯惨遭强奸和谋杀案的38名证人显然不采取行动的结果。旁观者效应是社会心理学中最具活力和可复制性的效应之一。然而，它缺乏实际效用，因为出于道德和实际原因，不可能在受控条件下对其进行科学研究。在这个项目中，我们的目标是研究虚拟环境中的旁观者效应，其他工作已经表明，人们倾向于现实地回应虚拟的社会情况。

The aim of this project is to dramatically improve the quality of immersive social virtual environments (IVEs). By 'quality' we refer to the response of participants to virtual social situations, in particular the extent to which they respond realistically to what they perceive. By 'response' we mean at every measurable level, ranging from non-conscious physiological processes (such as changes in electrodermal activity or heart rate variability) through to overt behavioural, emotional and cognitive responses / including what they report in interviews about their subjective state of mind. By social IVEs we specifically refer to applications where one or more human participants interact with virtual humanoid characters (avatars) in a socially defined context. Specifically, our objectives are to improve the visual appearance of interactive characters and their interactive behaviour especially so that their behaviour responds appropriately to the behaviour of the participants. Third, social IVEs will be constructed that are well-studied in the social psychology literature, and which are of great societal importance, referred to as bystander behaviour in violent emergencies such as in street violence. Finally, these virtual social situations will be used in a series of experimental studies in order to test whether indeed these objectives do improve the quality of response of participants within these social IVEs.One of our goals is to exploit our research in socially useful applications, and thereby also contribute to the growing body of research that uses VEs as a laboratory for social psychological research. In particular we consider the research program of Levine and colleagues at Lancaster on bystander behaviour in violent emergencies. This research program revisits the classic 'bystander effect' in social psychology. The bystander effect suggests that the more witnesses there are to an emergency, the less likely an individual bystander is to intervene. This phenomenon was identified as a consequence of the apparent inaction of 38 witnesses to the brutal rape and murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964. The bystander effect is one of the most robust and reproduced effects in social psychology. However, it lacks practical utility, since for ethical and practical reasons it is not possible to study it scientifically under controlled conditions. In this project we aim to study the bystander effect in the context of virtual environments, where other work has shown that people do tend to respond realistically to virtual social situations.