29.04.2016

Cognitive Interaction refers to the development and application of intelligent (cognitive) systems that enable advanced human-machine interaction scenarios. One increasingly popular technology in this regard is Virtual Reality (VR), which offers great potential and unique opportunities for realizing controllable and reproducible experiments on how humans interact with each other, with responsive environments, and with humanoid artificial characters. In this talk, we will present work on Cognitive Interaction in VR, carried out at the Center of Excellence „Cognitive Interaction Technology“ (CITEC) at Bielefeld University. We focus on the ICSPACE project, one of CITEC’s large-scale projects. ICSPACE explores how to provide intelligent coaching in sports training, motor skill learning, or physical rehabilitation. The goal is to develop a VR-based "Intelligent Coaching Space" that enables novel ways of adaptive, online feedback in a closed-loop interaction and training system. We will present work that enables different ingredients for this: (1) rendering and animation for low-latency interactive environments, (2) scanning and animation of realistic virtual avatars, (3) incremental dialogue and adaptive coaching through a virtual coach. In addition to technical and empirical results, we discuss links to other projects to demonstrate how this technology generalizes to other domains of assistance.