Guest Talk by Dr. Katja Zibrek (Inria Center at Rennes University, France).

Animation is the crucial part in designing autonomous virtual humans (agents) for immersive applications. It is the source of valuable information about the agent and important in communication with the user. Achieving a high level of appearance and behavioural realism is a considerably challenging endeavour. It is equally important to find ways to reliably evaluate the perception of virtual humans and virtual reality provides an excellent environment to collect user’s responses to virtual humans. In this talk, we will explore some of the research questions surrounding the perception of virtual humans, while focusing particularly on their non-verbal behaviour. Furthermore, we will cover some ways to use behavioral responses in virtual reality to evaluate human perception, specifically the walking trajectory analysis (proximity) and task completion.