Virtual humans are employed in many interactive applications using 3D virtual environments, including (serious) games. The motion of such virtual humans should look realistic (or ‘natural’) and allow interaction with the surroundings and other (virtual) humans. Current animation techniques differ in the trade-off they offer between motion naturalness and the control that can be exerted over the...

This study concerns determining the factors that may influence the communication skill of those university teachers involved in the field of agricultural sciences in Iran. Accordingly, based on a cross-sectional survey method, a conceptual model of communication skill has been devised through reviewing the related literature. Next, the model was revised by the expert panel of the study into a s...

In this paper I review some arguments of Douglas and myself concerning the concept of naturalness in string theory. I explain why the usual argument for low energy supersymmetry do not apply in this context. An incorrect argument in [7] is corrected. The statistical properties of the Landscape of vacua are strongly biased against low energy supersymmetry.

In this paper we present evidence that speech produced spontaneously in a conversation is considered more natural than read prompts. We also explore the relationship between participants’ expectations of the speech style under evaluation and their actual ratings. In successive listening tests subjects rated the naturalness of either spontaneously produced, read aloud or written sentences, with ...

The goal of this chapter is to explore and determine which evaluation criterion is most appropriate to assess the performance of 3D-display systems. It is assumed that these evaluation criteria take into account image quality as well as reproduced depth. The criterion that weighs depth most in addition to image quality is considered most appropriate. Experiment 1 explores the assessment criteri...

The key factors helping people to understand the synthesized voices of text-to-speech system are the naturalness and the intelligibility. However, making more natural voices remains a difficult task because of the speech data’s scarcity. With data limited corpus, prosodic information such as tone, intonation, Part-of-Speech is added to ensure the quality of synthetic speech. In the paper, we in...

It was observed by Veltman a long time ago that a special value for the Higgs boson mass could lead to a cancellation of the quadratically divergent corrections to the Higgs boson’s squared mass which appear at one loop. We present a class of low energy models that allow to soften the naturalness problem in the sense that there can be a cancellation of radiative corrections appearing at one loo...