Avatars in Conversation: The Importance of Simulating Territorial Behavior
Is it important to model human social territoriality in simulated conversations? Here we address this question by evaluating the believability of avatars’ virtual conversations powered by our simulation of territorial behaviors. Participants were asked to
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stract. Is it important to model human social territoriality in simulated conversations? Here we address this question by evaluating the believability of avatars’ virtual conversations powered by our simulation of territorial behaviors. Participants were asked to watch two videos and answer survey questions to compare them. The videos showed the same scene with and without our technology. The results support the hypothesis that simulating territorial behaviors can increase believability. Furthermore, there is evidence that our simulation of small scale group dynamics for conversational territories is a step in the right direction, even though there is still a large margin for improvement.
1 Introduction and Background This paper reports the results of a survey we conducted to evaluate the believability of our simulated avatar behavior for conversations. Our approach is strongly influenced by the theories of Human Territories [1] and F-formations [2], and it has been described in two previous publications [3,4]. It models the group dynamics of positions and orientations as a result of a special class of behaviors, conventionally called territorial behaviors, that we believe are essential for a complete simulation of a believable conversation. Most of the work on automating avatar conversations focuses on the generation of communicative behaviors after the conversation has already started. The assumption is that the avatars are already in the right location and correctly oriented for engaging each other. However, we developed a method to let the avatars autonomously cluster and arrange themselves when a conversation takes place. Our approach generates an emergent dynamic arrangement as the result of the behavioral constraints suggested by the territorial field of the conversation. As a result, the avatars dynamically react to each other’s position and orientation in a given social context. The purpose of the study is to investigate whether our approach, based on human territoriality, improves the believability of few avatars having a conversation, compared to the state of the art in avatar animation, that still relies on user control for moving them or at most arranges them into fixed formations such as a circle. A study by Jan and Traum [5] reports how the wrong positioning of virtual characters in a conversation significantly reduced the believability of the simulated social interaction. The finding lead to their model of small scale group dynamics for conversations [6], the first to keep proper positioning but not proper orientations. So far, an evaluation of believability of that model has not been conducted. J. Allbeck et al. (Eds.): IVA 2010, LNAI 6356, pp. 336–342, 2010. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
Avatars in Conversation: The Importance of Simulating Territorial Behavior
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Believability is hard to define. It is a construct and a hypothetical variable that cannot be measured directly. Therefore, we have chosen four variables we believe relate to believability when we evaluate simulated soci
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