Research News & Events

Having acquired skills of falling in synthetic love, making long-term cyber relationships, and playing pool with two hands, it’s time to take care of the artificial stamina! Recently, robots became active supporters of football and they began to play this most famous game in the world.

How to model a human-to-robot romantic relationship? Just a few elements will do: artificial emotional hormones, intelligent affective system and probabilistic parameters of love between humans and the robot…

If you take this course, you will be graded just like Stanford University students, and you can get a certificate matching your skills to the Stanford grading curve. Though online, it is a serious class: 8 homework assignments, 2 timed exams and many hard deadlines. To pass this class, expect to work at least 10 hours per week - Stanford students do all this! Become one of them starting in September 2011.

The virtual humans industry is growing very fast, as predicted the futurist Erwin van Lun and independent research companies such as Gartner or CCM Benchmark. Nevertheless, many advanced research projects, 3D human design methods or modeling techniques are not commonly known. Therefore, we would like to present three extraordinary state of the art examples of humanlike conversational artificial intelligence. They are expected to be adopted soon by the virtual humans industry.

Researchers from Human Centered Multimedia at the University of Augsburg developed a virtual character which is capable of recognizing and displaying the emotion of a user.

Virtual agents’  reasoning and actions are tightly connected with their awareness ability helping to relate to the environment during a conversation. Researchers invented the combination of virtual reality and artificial intelligence techniques to simulate living conversational agents being aware of themselves, the virtual world around them, and other virtual beings existing in that environment.

Conversational virtual humans are nowadays applied to the field of neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology. The technology has evolved to a point where researchers may begin developing mental health applications that make use of virtual reality patients. Human patients with acute neurological illnesses are often confused and unable to cooperate with clinicians during medical consultations. Imagine a simulated training with virtual humans having real mental disorders, willing to talk to their doctors, and sharing their emotions!