Let’s Come Together — Social Navigation Behaviors of Virtual and Real Humans

Abstract

In this paper, we present a game-like scenario that is based on a model of social group dynamics inspired by theories from the social sciences. The model is augmented by a model of proxemics that simulates the role of distance and spatial orientation in human-human communication. By means of proxemics, a group of human participants may signal other humans whether they welcome new group members to join or not. In this paper, we describe the results of an experiment we conducted to shed light on the question of how humans respond to such cues when shown by virtual humans.

Cultural differences in how an engagement-seeking robot should approach a group of people

“…Given that different cultures exist, and that research by Rehm et al [16] found that participants from high-contact cultures stand closer to a group of people compared with people from low-contact cultures, we hypothesize a similar cultural dependent preference will exist when a robot approaches.…”

“…Rehm et al [16] report the "six most occurring formations", and divide these six in open and closed formations. People in open formations are said to allow others to join the conversation; while this is not the case with closed formations.…”

“…People in open formations are said to allow others to join the conversation; while this is not the case with closed formations. In an experiment with virtual characters, Rehm et al [16] found that participants were more likely to join an open formation (84% of the trials) than a closed formation. All participants positioned themselves at a social distance, half in the close-social, and half in the far-social distance.…”

Social Puppets: Towards Modular Social Animation for Agents and Avatars

“…When moving into a dynamic 3D game environment, more behaviors and more complex patterns of interaction need to be considered, for example to deal with a larger numbers of participants and longer locomotion distances. Research into the generation of believable communicative behavior in multi-party settings is growing, but has for the most part focused on one or two kinds of behavior at a time such as posture or gaze [6], [15].…”

Designing Emotions

“…However, the expression of emotion has equally received attention, in particular in the area of intelligent virtual agents [23] where current research is trying to abstract from animation problems to higher levels of behavior [10], intention [7] and social relations [20]. This is accompanied by a general interest of the computing sciences to join forces with psychologists and social scientists on this topic, as evident in networks of excellence like HU-MAINE 1 or SSPNET 2 , and the W3C standardization effort of EmotionML 3 that aims at being an interface between the three areas of manual data annotation, emotion recognition and emotional behavior generation (including face/body animation).…”