The Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group at University College London (UCL) have been undertaking research in the design of virtual humanoids, in conjunction with our psychology departments and other universities around the globe. Most of the research focuses on making virtual collaborators more realistic and believable. Virtual humans can be used as an interface to represent us while visiting virtual environments (VEs) or they can be built as a self-sufficient sentient to co-inhabit with users in VEs. This involves not only designing and building physically believable virtual humanoids but also embodying them with behaviour traits to enable them to interact with other users in the virtual environments.
Some works hypothesise that behaviour realism is more important to aid believability. However, recent research into eye-gaze behaviour in avatars suggest that there is a correlation between physical and behavioural realism. In fact it was found that embodying a photo-simplistic with complex inferred behaviour was detrimental to the levels of believability and face-to-face effectiveness experienced in the shared virtual environment. Users of VEs expect a behaviour model consistent the physical appearance of the virtual human in order to believe that the virtual human is real and suspend their sense of disbelief.
Research into "better looking" virtual humans is ongoing. With the current rate of advancements in the rendering of virtual objects, better avatars and agents are constantly emerging. Needs of a virtual humanoid other than good looks include:
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