On Tuesday 11 August CAMERA were thrilled to welcome Dr Rachel McDonnell to discuss her latest research on interactions with virtual humans. You can watch Rachel’s presentation here or on our YouTube Channel!

Abstract

Computer generated virtual humans play an important role in many 3D graphical applications, and are often used to evoke empathic responses from human users, due to their human form and behaviour. Recent advancements in computer graphics techniques allow photorealism to be achieved in real-time, where characters are almost indistinguishable from their real counterparts. These characters will be commonplace in more applications in the future, ranging from virtual reality and telepresence to chatbots for marketing, customer service, and even healthcare. However, it is still unclear whether realistic depictions are necessary or even desired by human users. In fact, negative reactions to high levels of realism are common and have been attributed to many factors including incongruence between their motion, appearance, behaviour and speech. This talk will present some of our research on the perception of photorealistic virtual humans, and discuss our technical pipelines for generating realistic characters.