Record, Transform & Reproduce Social Encounters in Immersive VR: An Iterative Approach

Immersive Virtual Reality Environments that can be accessed through multimodal natural interfaces will bring new affordances to mediated interaction with virtual embodied agents and avatars. Such interfaces will measure, amongst others, users' poses and motion which can be copied to an embodied avatar representation of the user that is situated in a virtual or augmented reality space shared with autonomous virtual agents and human controlled or semi-autonomous avatars. Designers of such environments will be challenged to facilitate believable social interactions by creating agents or semi-autonomous avatars that can respond meaningfully to users' natural behaviors, as captured by these interfaces. In our future research, we aim to realize such interactions to create rich social encounters in immersive Virtual Reality. In this current work, we present the approach we envisage to analyze and learn agent behavior from human-agent interaction in an iterative fashion. We specifically look at small-scale, `regulative' nonverbal behaviors. Agents inform their behavior on previous observations, observing responses that these behaviors elicit in new users, thus iteratively generating corpora of short, situated human-agent interaction sequences that are to be analyzed, annotated and processed to generate socially intelligent agent behavior. Some choices and challenges of this approach are discussed.