Non-verbal Communication for Correlational Characters

Social interaction is a key element of modern virtual environments. This paper discusses how non-verbal communication (or body language) is vital to real world social interaction, and how it is important to carry it over to virtual environments. It is not sufficient for a character to passively exhibit non-verbal communication; non-verbal communication should be a genuine interaction between a real and virtual person. To this aim the behaviour of the character should correlate realistically with that of the real person. We hypothesise that this sort of correlational nonverbal behaviour enhances presence and outline work in progress to investigate this hypothesis. We present a virtual character that exhibits this type of correlational behaviour in an immersive virtual environment.