High-Fidelity Avatars for Behaviour and Cognition Research

虚拟现实（VR）变得越来越复杂。现在可以建造由代表真实的人的化身居住的世界，他们的肖像已经被“扫描”到系统中。当然，这些发展是由娱乐和游戏行业推动的，但这项技术的发展也为社会科学研究人员开辟了许多新的机会。简而言之，在真实的生活中很难设置的“虚拟空间”环境中进行研究和实验是可能的。我们的研究旨在开发一个易于使用的工具包，供研究人员构建用于研究的虚拟世界。我们将开发基于真实的人构建逼真化身的程序，这些化身可以以自然的方式与实验参与者互动，包括面部表情和眼睛方向的时刻变化。这些线索对日常互动非常重要，但在典型的实验室实验中很难控制-例如，确保所有参与者都暴露在相同的体验中。这在虚拟现实中成为可能，实验者可以相对直接地操纵化身的行为。我们之前在一个虚拟现实机场的ESRC资助的工作表明，某些任务，例如检查护照，可以以非常接近现实生活设置的方式进行模拟。此外，实验结果在两种设置中非常相似。在这里，我们将进一步开发与化身交互的可能性范围（即超越简单的身份检查）。我们还将为研究人员开发通用工具，以创建丰富的虚拟环境，其中包含可以与用户进行动态灵活交互的人。我们将创建手册和演示视频，以支持研究人员建立他们的实验，而不需要复杂的编程技能。通过这种方式，我们的目标是向社会科学家提供VR技术的最新进展，为新的研究开辟令人兴奋的可能性。

Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming more and more sophisticated. It is now possible to build worlds inhabited by avatars representing real people, whose likenesses have been 'scanned in' to the system. Of course, these developments have been driven by the entertainment and gaming industry, but the development of this technology also opens up many new opportunities for social sciences researchers. In short, it is possible to carry out research and conduct experiments in 'virtual space' situations that would be very difficult to set up in real life.Our research aims to develop an easy-to-use toolkit for researchers to build virtual worlds for the purpose of research. We will develop procedures for constructing realistic avatars, based on real people, which can interact with experimental participants in natural ways, including moment-by-moment changes in facial expression and eye-direction. These are cues that are very important to everyday interactions, but they are difficult to control in typical lab-based experiments - for example to ensure that all participants are exposed to the same experience. This becomes possible in virtual reality, where experimenters can manipulate the behaviour of the avatars relatively straightforwardly. Our previous ESRC-funded work in a Virtual Reality airport has shown that certain tasks, for example checking passports, can be simulated in ways that are very close to real-life settings. Furthermore, experimental results are very similar in both settings. Here we will develop further the range of possibilities for interacting with avatars (i.e. beyond simple identity checking). We will also develop general tools for researchers to create rich virtual environments containing people who can interact dynamically and flexibly with users. We will create manuals and walk-through videos to support researchers building their experiments, without the need for complex programming skills. In this way, we aim to make available the recent advances in VR technology to social scientists, opening up exciting possibilities for new research.