Difficulties in living in a different culture are caused by different patterns of thinking, feeling and potential actions. A good way to experience cultural immersion is to walk in a crowd. Simulated Crowd is a novel tool for allowing people to practice culture-specific nonverbal communication behaviors. [1] A conceptual framework of a simulated crowd is realized using an immersive interactive environment. Technical challenges include real-time eye gaze recognition in a dynamic moving situation, sensing of nonverbal behaviors using multiple range sensors, and behavior generation based on novel temporal data mining algorithms. Figure 1 illustrates how the user interacts with a simulated crowd with synthetic agents. Queuing behaviors have been added.
Fig.1: Simulated Crowd — a snapshot of interaction
Videos
- Immersive Display Queuing Experiment 4 by Nils van Kleef (March 14, 2012)
- Second video: 360 Degree Virtual Crowd by Divesh Lala (June 19, 2011)
- First Video by Divesh Lala(May 23, 2011)
Reference
[1] Sutasinee Thovuttikul, Divesh Lala, Hiroki Ohashi, Shogo Okada, Yoshimasa Ohmoto, and Toyoaki Nishida: Simulated Crowd: Towards a Synthetic Culture for Engaging a Learner in Culture-dependent Nonverbal Interaction, 2nd Workshop on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction, Stanford University, USA, February 13, 2011