Workshop on Modelling realistic Virtual Humans (VH) and Social robots and user interaction

The goal of this tutorial is to give the CASA audience a broad view of how we model VHs and Social Robots, how we animate them and how we model their humanlike  functionalities from various input signals during interaction. Students and attendance will have the possibility to know either in VH or Social Robots what is the state of the Art and what is still needed to go for natural human-VH/social robots interaction.

We will describe the main modules necessary to simulate realistic interactive interaction for VH and Social Robots. We will first describe how we build Virtual Humans, and social robots and then we will explain what are the main  methods to capture social signals, how they are handled both by VH and social robots, and finally how the reaction is modelled.

The detailed description of the tutorial is as follows:

• Building VH: State of the Art, and commercial software available. (Yvain). 60 minutes including questions

• Animating VH: State of the Art, and commercial software available (Yvain) 60 minutes including questions

• Building humanoid Social Robots: State of the Art.  Examples with 3D printing will be also discussed. (Nadia) 60 minutes including questions

• Methods to capture and analyze input data as face, speech, gestures recognition, emotions and gaze. State of the art (Nadia, James) 60 minutes including questions

• State of the Art on emotion classification, affect dynamics and episodic memory. (James) 60 minutes including questions

• Generating human gestures, particularly facial emotions, gestures, hand grasping. Examples will be provided with VH and Nadine Social robot including links with chatbox, memory and emotions. (James, Nadia) 60 minutes including questions

• Final conclusions and questions (all) 30 minutes

Attendance: all person interested in social interaction with VH or Social Robot