Non-verbal communication (NVC) plays a major role in various aspects of human life (Andersen, 2004; Cameron, 2001; Johnstone, 2008). Children learning their first language come to realize non-verbal communication as their socialization process takes place (Fletcher & German, 1990; Ingram, 1996; Owens, 2001). However, most EFL learners may have little exposure to these non-verbal aspects of comm...

Assistive robotics will become integral to the everyday lives of a human population that is increasingly mobile, older, urban-centric and networked. The overwhelming demands on healthcare delivery alone will compel the adoption of assistive robotics. How will we communicate with such robots, and how will they communicate with us? This research makes the case for a relatively “artificial” mode o...

non-verbal communication (nvc) plays a major role in various aspects of human life (andersen, 2004; cameron, 2001; johnstone, 2008). children learning their first language come to realize non-verbal communication as their socialization process takes place (fletcher & german, 1990; ingram, 1996; owens, 2001). however, most efl learners may have little exposure to these non-verbal aspects of ...

The increased interest in Spanish as a Foreign Language (FL) has meant that in China alone there are 25,000 university students taking Spanish courses (Instituto Cervantes, 2013). The demand for Spanish language and culture courses has yet to be met by adequate numbers of teachers with a good understanding of Chinese culture, especially if we question the uniformity of that culture over all reg...

Virtual agents are systems that add a social dimension to computing, often featuring not only natural language input but also an embodiment or avatar. This allows them take on more role and leverage the use of nonverbal communication (NVC). In humans, NVC is used for many purposes, including communicating intent, directing attention, conveying emotion. As result, researchers have developed emul...

Understanding human emotions and their nonverbal messages is one of the most necessary and important skills for making the next generation of human-computer interfaces (HCI) easier, more natural and effective. Indeed, the first step toward an automatic emotion sensitive human-computer system having the ability to automatically detect users’ nonverbal signals is the development of an accurate an...

This chapter provides a case study of a research project investigating aspects of facial expression and viewer response to the „Uncanny Valley‟ (Mori, 1970) in realistic, human-like, virtual characters. In humans, there exists a rich variety of information that can be obtained through nonverbal communication (NVC) (Ekman, 1965). However, empirical evidence collected as part of this research pro...

Non-verbal communication (NVC) is considered to represent more than 90 percent of everyday communication. In virtual world, this important aspect of interaction between virtual humans (VH) is strongly neglected. This paper presents a user-test study to demonstrate the impact of automatically generated graphics-based NVC expression on the dialog quality: first, we wanted to compare impassive and...

Non-verbal communication (NVC) makes up about two-thirds of all communication between two people or between one speaker and a group of listeners. However, this fundamental aspect of communicating is mostly omitted in 3D social forums or virtual world oriented games. This paper proposes an answer by presenting a multi-user 3D-chatting system enriched with NVC relative to motion. This event-based...