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Let’s keep in touch online: a Facebook aware virtual human interface

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Abstract

A virtual human is an effective interface for interacting with users and plays an important role in carrying out certain tasks. As social networking sites are getting more and more popular, we propose a Facebook aware virtual human. The social networking sites are used to empower virtual humans for interpersonal conversational interaction in this paper. We combine Internet world, physical world and 3D virtual world together to create a new interface for users to interact with an autonomous virtual human which can behave like a real modern human. In order to take advantages of social networking sites, virtual human gathers information of a user from its profile, its likes, dislikes and gauge mood from most recent status update. In two user studies, we investigated whether and how this new interface can enhance human–virtual human interaction. Some positive results concluded from these studies will be guidelines on research and development of future virtual human interfaces.

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  1. http://thinknook.com/.

  2. http://www.affective-sciences.org/researchmaterial.

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Acknowledgements

This research, which is carried out at BeingThere Centre, is supported by the Singapore National Research Foundation under its International Research Centre @ Singapore Funding Initiative and administered by the IDM Programme Office. The authors would like to thank all researchers and staffs in IMI-NTU for their efforts on development of the virtual human platform and discussions about this work. The first author is partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No: 61003197).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Media Innovation, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Gengdai Liu, Shantanu Choudhary, Juzheng Zhang & Nadia Magenenat-Thalmann

  2. Xidian University, Xi’an, China

    Gengdai Liu

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  1. Gengdai Liu
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  2. Shantanu Choudhary
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  3. Juzheng Zhang
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  4. Nadia Magenenat-Thalmann
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Correspondence to Gengdai Liu.

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Liu, G., Choudhary, S., Zhang, J. et al. Let’s keep in touch online: a Facebook aware virtual human interface. Vis Comput 29, 871–881 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-013-0846-9

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