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

该项目的目的是显著提高沉浸式社交虚拟环境(IVES)的质量。所谓“质量”，指的是参与者对虚拟社交情境的反应，特别是他们对所感知的事物做出实际反应的程度。我们所说的反应指的是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)到公开的行为、情绪和认知反应/包括他们在采访中报告的主观心理状态。我们所说的社交Ive具体指的是一个或多个人类参与者在社会定义的上下文中与虚拟类人角色(化身)交互的应用程序。具体地说，我们的目标是改善互动角色的视觉外观和他们的互动行为，特别是使他们的行为对参与者的行为做出适当的反应。第三，将构建在社会心理学文献中得到充分研究并具有重大社会意义的社会生活，即在街头暴力等暴力突发事件中的旁观者行为。最后，这些虚拟社交情境将被用于一系列实验研究，以测试这些目标是否确实改善了这些社交生活中参与者的反应质量。我们的目标之一是利用我们的研究在社会有用的应用中进行开发，从而也有助于将VES用作社会心理学研究的实验室的研究越来越多。特别是，我们考虑了莱文和他在兰开斯特的同事关于暴力紧急情况下的旁观者行为的研究计划。这个研究项目重温了社会心理学中的经典“旁观者效应”。旁观者效应表明，紧急情况的目击者越多，个别旁观者干预的可能性就越小。这一现象被确认为1964年纽约残忍强奸和谋杀Kitty Genovese案的38名证人显然没有采取行动的结果。旁观者效应是社会心理学中最强健和最具重现性的效应之一。然而，它缺乏实用价值，因为出于伦理和实践原因，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，其他研究表明，人们确实倾向于对虚拟社会情景做出现实的反应。

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.