Video Games & Online Games

This post in an attempt to disambiguate the domain of virtual humans. Most people have never heard the term “Virtual Human” before, but they all play games (online or offline) and they all have interacted with some limited form of a VH on the web.

Computer games (online and offline) are the closest thing to the domain of Virtual humans.

Online games (e-gaming)

You can argue that online games are much simpler than video games, but they are progressively getting much more complicated. As in video games, fully-fleshed avatars are widely used to immerse the player into the scenario. Below is an example of a poker game I found from a company called PKR. Notice the use of body language, face expressions, etc to create a fully realistic poker simulation.  

Video Games:

Below is a screenshot from my favourite game Mass Effect:

Source: http://www.jpbrown.co.uk/reviews.html 

Notice the use of dialogue wheels to simulate dialogues between the avatars. There is an excellent analysis of the particular style of conversation here: 

However, in contrast to most current video games Virtual humans engage players in actual dialogue, using speech recognition, dialogue system technology, and emotional modelling to deepen the experience and make it more entertaining. Such technologies have started only recently to find their way into video games. Tom Clansy’s End War game is using speech recognition to allow users to give commands to their armies.

Source: http://www.the-chiz.com/

Some games go as far as using full natural language processing:

Virtual Humans on the Web:

There are a lot of very superficial virtual humans on the web. This is perhaps one of the main reasons that they have failed so far to become a mainstream interface. What virtual humans should be, is about the whole thing: emotion modelling, cognition speech, dialogue, domain strategies and knowledge, gestures etc. Avatars like Anna of IKEA are mere drawings with very limited dialogue abilities, and are simply there to create a more interesting FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) Section. There is still someway to go before we will see full-scaled avatars on the web, but we will get there.

 

  Source: http://www.ikeafans.com/forums/swaps-exchanges/1178-malm-bed-help.html