Abstract
We consider the role of gaze and direction of attention for providing embodied agents with the capability of visually perceiving the attention of others in a virtual environment. Such a capability is of importance in social environments where the directions in which others orient themselves provides information necessary for detecting important social cues and serving as a basis for inferring information about their possible motives, desires and intentions. Our real-time model uses synthetic vision and memory to implement a perceptually-based theory of mind that considers the direction of the eyes, head, body and locomotion of others. These contribute to metrics that describe the awareness and amount of interest that another is deemed to have in the self. We apply this capability to an automated conversation initiation scenario where an agent who encounters a potential interaction partner considers not only its own interaction goal, but also its theory of the goal of the other. Our aim is to improve the plausibility of animated social interaction and is inspired by human social behaviour, where one generally wishes to avoid the embarrassing situation of committing to a conversation with an unwilling participant.
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Peters, C. (2005). Direction of Attention Perception for Conversation Initiation in Virtual Environments. In: Panayiotopoulos, T., Gratch, J., Aylett, R., Ballin, D., Olivier, P., Rist, T. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3661. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11550617_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11550617_19
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