Skip Rizzo

University of Southern California, Institute for Creative Technologies, Faculty Member

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Detection and Computational Analysis of Psychological Signals Using a Virtual Human Interviewing Agent

It has long been recognized that facial expressions, body posture/gestures and vocal parameters p... more It has long been recognized that facial expressions, body posture/gestures and vocal parameters play an important role in human communication and the implicit signalling of emotion. Recent advances in low cost computer vision and behavioral sensing technologies can now be applied to the process of making meaningful inferences as to user state when a person interacts with a computational device. Effective use of this additive information could serve to promote human interaction with virtual human (VH) agents that may enhance diagnostic assessment. The same technology could also be leveraged to improve engagement in teletherapy approaches between remote patients and care providers. This paper will focus on our current research in these areas within the DARPA-funded “Detection and Computational Analysis of Psychological Signals” project, with specific attention to the SimSensei application use case. SimSensei is a virtual human interaction platform that is able to sense and interpret r...

Virtual Humans in Augmented Reality

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, 2019

We present one of the first applications of virtual humans in Augmented Reality (AR), which allow... more We present one of the first applications of virtual humans in Augmented Reality (AR), which allows young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) the opportunity to practice job interviews. It uses the Magic Leap's AR hardware sensors to provide users with immediate feedback on six different metrics, including eye gaze, blink rate and head orientation. The system provides two characters, with three conversational modes each. Ported from an existing desktop application, the main development lessons learned were: 1) provide users with navigation instructions in the user interface, 2) avoid dark colors as they are rendered transparently, 3) use dynamic gaze so characters maintain eye contact with the user, 4) use hardware sensors like eye gaze to provide user feedback, and 5) use surface detection to place characters dynamically in the world.

Virtual Humans for Learning

AI Magazine, 2013

Virtual humans are computer‐generated characters designed to look and behave like real people. St... more Virtual humans are computer‐generated characters designed to look and behave like real people. Studies have shown that virtual humans can mimic many of the social effects that one finds in human‐human interactions such as creating rapport, and people respond to virtual humans in ways that are similar to how they respond to real people. We believe that virtual humans represent a new metaphor for interacting with computers, one in which working with a computer becomes much like interacting with a person and this can bring social elements to the interaction that are not easily supported with conventional interfaces. We present two systems that embody these ideas. The first, the twins are virtual docents in the Museum of Science, Boston, designed to engage visitors and raise their awareness and knowledge of science. The second, Sim‐Coach, uses an empathetic virtual human to provide veterans and their families with information about PTSD and depression.

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Session details: Fighting Pain and Suffering with Clinical Virtual Reality and Virtual Humans

Proceedings of the 2015 Virtual Reality International Conference

Shodhshauryam, International Scientific Refereed Research Journal

Various new technologies and aiding instruments are always being introduced for the betterment of... more Various new technologies and aiding instruments are always being introduced for the betterment of the challenged. This project focuses on aiding the mute in expressing their views and ideas in a much efficient and effective manner thereby creating their own place in this world. The proposed system focuses on using various gestures traced into texts which could in turn be transformed into speech. The gesture identification and mapping is performed by the Kinect device, which is found to cost effective and reliable. A suitable text to speech convertor is used to translate the texts generated from Kinect into a speech. The proposed system though cannot be applied to man-to-man conversation owing to the hardware complexities, but could find itself very much of use under addressing environments such as auditoriums, classrooms.

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