Few direct comparisons have been made between the responsiveness of children with autism to computer-generated or animated characters and their responsiveness to humans. Twelve 4- to 8-year-old children with autism interacted with a human therapist; a human-controlled, interactive avatar in a theme park; a human actor speaking like the avatar; and cartoon characters who sought social responses....

Intuitive navigation is extremely important for the exploration of virtual environments. The best navigation is available in computer games, where it is mandatory that the player can control the movements of his avatar quickly and with a steep learning curve. Such intuitive navigation requires collision detection. In this paper we present a system that performs a very fast and robust collision ...

Seeing others is a central metaphor in James Cameron’s film Avatar, used as a means to express empathy and empathic bonding throughout the film, both between humans and the Na’vi, and between the Na’vi and the animals that inhabit their world. Empathy entails an ability to see and feel the world from another’s perspective—feeling with rather than feeling for. Jake Sully’s shifting and boundary-...

This paper describes an automatic 3-D facial fitting technique for a Second Life avatar. It is often difficult to create an original avatar by yourself that resembles a real person. In Second Life, the combinations of systemdefined parameters deform the shape of the avatar, and we can’t control each vertex directly. It needs to encode the deformation information into many parameters. As a refer...

In this paper we describe secondary behaviour, this is behaviour that is generated autonomously for an avatar. The user will control various aspects of the avatars behaviour but a truly expressive avatar must produce more complex behaviour than a user could specify in real time. Secondary behaviour provides some of this expressive behaviour autonomously. However, though it is produced autonomou...

The human ability to express and recognize emotions plays an important role in face-to-face communication, and as technology advances it will be increasingly important for computer-generated avatars to be similarly expressive. In this paper, we present the detailed development process for the Lifelike Responsive Avatar Framework (LRAF) and a prototype application for modeling a specific individ...

We created an exhibit based on a new locomotion interface for swimming in a virtual reality ocean environment as part of our Swimming Across the Pacific art project. In our exhibit we suspend the swimmer using a hand gliding and leg harness with pulleys and ropes in an 8ft-cubic swimming apparatus. The virtual reality ocean world has sky, sea waves, splashes, ocean floor and an avatar represent...

This paper aims to develop an instrument to measure Player-Avatar Identification (PAI) in video game playing. Survey studies were conducted with over 1000 students in Singapore primary and secondary schools. The results of the studies demonstrated that PAI can be conceptualized and reliably measured in terms of four factors – feelings during play, absorption during play, positive attitudes towa...

The aim of the present study was to demonstrate for the first time that brain waves can be used by a tetraplegic to control movements of his wheelchair in virtual reality (VR). In this case study, the spinal cord injured (SCI) subject was able to generate bursts of beta oscillations in the electroencephalogram (EEG) by imagination of movements of his paralyzed feet. These beta oscillations were...