Title: Teaching Communication Skills with Virtual Humans

At the University of Florida (UF), our research team has worked on applying virtual humans as partners in interpersonal communication scenarios. The goal of the project: teach communication skills using virtual humans (VHs). The simulation of an interaction between people to facilitate teaching, training, and testing of communication skills would be a powerful new application of VR. With VHs, is the human representation engaging users on such a powerful level that the interface significantly impacts effectiveness? Our approach is to employ natural methods of interaction with the VH. We are striving to create an experience similar to two (initially) people talking. During the past two years, we have worked on a system where the user’s speech, gestures, and body language are inputs to life-sized rendered and animated 3D conversation VHs. This is as opposed to using traditional interfaces, such as monitors, mice, and keyboards. Technology limitations, such as speech recognition accuracy, emotion perception, and eye-gaze tracking, would not allow for a generalized interpersonal experience. Thus, to study virtual humans, we have created and refined a constrained scenario involving a virtual patient (VP), DIANA (DIgital ANimated Avatar), being interview by a medical student. Currently, students learn, practice, and are tested on communication skills with standardized patients (SPs), actors trained to mimic condition symptoms. The research team includes experts in computer science, medicine, communication, and education, from the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering Department, College of Education, and the College of Medicine at UF, and the College of Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia (MCG). DIANA is a female college student with acute abdominal pain (AP). Students interview DIANA in a standard exam room, and the experience attempts to mirror a patient encounter. DIANA is a life-sized VH and communicates with speech, gestures, and body language. By using a natural interface, we aim to have the student interact with DIANA naturally, and thus allow the training of interviewing and communication skills. In the scenario, DIANA has appendicitis, while VIC (Virtual Interactive Character), a male virtual character, is an observing expert (Figure 1). DIANA and VIC’s gestures and responses were created by medical faculty and archival videos of AP SP interviews.