Using Virtual Humans to Bootstrap the Creation of Other Virtual Humans

Virtual human (VH) experiences are increasingly used for training interpersonal skills such as military leadership, classroom education, and doctor-patient interviews. These diverse applications of conversational VHs have a common and unexplored thread – a significant additional population would be afforded interpersonal skills training if VHs were available to simulate either interaction partner. We propose a computer-assisted approach to generate a virtual medical student from hundreds of interactions between a virtual patient and real medical students. This virtual medical student is then used to train standardized patients – human actors who roleplay the part of patients in practice doctor-patient encounters. Practice with a virtual medical student is expected to lead to greater standardization of roleplay encounters, and more accurate evaluation of medical student competency. We discuss the method for generating VHs from an existing corpus of human-VH interactions and present observations from a pilot experiment to determine the utility of the virtual medical student for training.