An expressive virtual audience with flexible behavioral styles

Currently, expressive virtual humans are used in psychological research, training, and psychotherapy. However, the behavior of these virtual humans is usually scripted and therefore cannot be modified freely at runtime. To address this, we created a virtual audience with parameterized behavioral styles. This paper presents a parameterized...

Human Aspects in Ambient Intelligence: Contemporary Challenges and Solutions

This book presents recent developments is the field of human aspects in Ambient Intelligence. This field, and the associated workshop series, addresses multidisciplinary aspects of AmI with human-directed disciplines such as psychology, social science, neuroscience and biomedical sciences. The aim of the workshop series is to get researchers...

Determining mental load through measuring brain signals

How can you tell whether someone working or gaming is mentally taxed too high or too low? In collaboration with Noldus IT (Wageningen) and the FC Donders Institute (Nijmegen), TNO designed and conducted an experiment to measure mental load through brain signals. 35 participants performed a computer task that varied in difficulty. Our classifiers...

Gamification for astronaut training

This paper reports on the use and the evaluation of applying gaming aspects as a means to promote self-study and increase motivation to train for executing operations on human space flight missions that have a duration that exceeds the typical duration of low earth orbit missions. The gaming aspects that are evaluated include avatar...

Long-term human-robot interaction with young users

Artificial companion agents have the potential to combine novel means for effective health communication with young patients support and entertainment. However, the theory and practice of long-term child-robot interaction is currently an underdeveloped area of research. This paper introduces an approach that integrates multiple functional...

Child's recognition of emotions in robot's face and body

Social robots can comfort and support children who have to cope with chronic diseases. In previous studies, a "facial robot", the iCat, proved to show well-recognized emotional expressions that are important in social interactions. The question is if a mobile robot without a face, the Nao, can express emotions with its body. First, dynamic body...

Internet-delivered multi-patient virtual reality exposure therapy system for the treatment of anxiety disorders

Motivation - The project is to reduce the therapist's workload in virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) for anxiety disorders and explore cognitive ergonomic factors in the design of an internet-delivered multi-patient treatment system. Research questions - The aim can be achieved by system improvement on both the patient side and the...

Effects of mobile support on situation awareness and navigation in a field and game environment

For surveillance and rescue operations, human navigation and situation awareness should be well-supported. However, proper testing of new and innovative mobile support is hard for such operations. Evaluations in field settings are expensive, difficult to control, potentially dangerous, and may sometimes be impossible to execute. Using a virtual...

Influence of moving visual surroundings on walking

Introduction: Balance is negatively influenced by optokinetic stimuli. Fall research with these stimuli has been done with standing subjects. Less is known of the influence these stimuli have on risk of falling while walking. The objective of this study was to qualitatively investigate the influence of optokinetic roll stimuli on balance during...

Rolling into spatial disorientation: Simulator demonstration of the post-roll (Gillingham) illusion

Introduction: Spatial disorientation (SD) is still a contributing factor in many aviation accidents, stressing the need for adequate SD training scenarios. In this article we focused on the post-roll effect (the sensation of rolling back after a roll maneuver, such as an entry of a coordinated turn) and investigated the effect of roll stimuli on...

Simulating human movement

New methods to automatically generate virtual character movements. GATE - Overview of activities 2007-2010 - Looking at the future of games

Brain controlled navigation through virtual worlds

New techniques based on brain signals aim to make navigation through virtual worlds more intuitive. GATE - Overview of activities 2007-2010 - Looking at the future of games