TSB technique: Increasing a User's Sense of immersion with Intelligent Virtual Agents
Document Type Conference Paper
21st. Conference National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Student Symposium, 2010
Abstract
The field of Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) research depends heavily on immersive techniques when presenting virtual agents to end users. This sense of immersion relies on the user believing the agent to be real and present in their en- vironment, creating the Illusion of Life [21]. This poster describes the on-going research into using a combination of three rendering techniques, Twisting, Stretching and Boxing (TSB), to create a fully immersive 3D illusion for an end-user from any viewpoint, as they move freely in front of displays distributed across large populated environments. The novel approach outlined in this poster, uses head tracking, face de- tection and the TSB technique to increase the user's sense of immersion and subsequently their sense of the agent's pres- ence within the environment. Using only web-cameras, our approach is a hardware-light solution which does not require the end-user to wear any additional apparatus, such as the LED headset used in [10]. The poster primarily discusses our Approach, the Preliminary Experiments & Results, Pro- posed Evaluation Process and Future Work.