Calendar

06 FEB 2025
12.00 - 13.00u
LUNCH MEETING

DIGIREAL lunch meeting 14: Emotional Interactions with Virtual Humans

Lunch meeting

The first two DIGIREAL lunch meetings of 2025 celebrate the start of project VHESPER which examines the emerging role of virtual humans (VHs) - highly interactive, realistic digital agents - across various applications, including healthcare, education, and entertainment.

06 FEB 2025
12.00 - 17.00u
LUNCH MEETING

The VHESPER project also aims to strengthen European research networks by exploring VHs’ societal impacts, conducting experiments on empathic interactions between real and virtual humans, and laying the groundwork for EU-funded research and development (R&D) proposals.

Join the meeting on February 6 to find out more about the work of the VHESPER partners University of Bremen and Humboldt-University of Berlin.

Dr. Dennis Küster, senior researcher in the high-profile area "Minds, Media, Machines" at the University of Bremen, earned his PhD from Jacobs University Bremen in 2008, focusing on the relationship between emotional experience and social context. His work examines emotions in interactions mediated by computers, avatars, and robots, and he has published extensively on emotions, tears and nonverbal behavior in computer-mediated communication.

Currently, he researches Electromyography (EMG)-based facial action unit recognition (AUR) as a privacy-friendly alternative to video analysis and applies machine learning to animate avatars. In the VHESPER project, he contributes expertise on the psychological impact of avatar tears and the social perception of virtual humans.
 
Dr. Küster will share findings on EMG-based AUR for both low- and high-intensity expressions using two types of mobile electrodes. These results suggest that EMG-based AUR is a viable approach for automatically detecting subtle expressions. The presentation will conclude with a discussion on how this method could be applied to enable privacy-preserving avatar animation.

Ursula Hess, Professor of Psychology at Humboldt-University of Berlin, earned her Ph.D. from Dartmouth College in 1989. Her research focuses on emotion communication, including nonverbal mimicry and the impact of emotional expressions on impression formation. A former president of the Society for Research on Emotion and the Society for Psychophysiological Research, she has authored over 200 publications, including five books.

Emotion communication usually occurs within a specific situational context. In recent years research on the impact of context on emotion communication has blossomed but the operationalizations used were often problematic. The use of VH allows to create stimuli which can be embedded naturalistically in a rich context. Ursula Hess will present research leveraging this approach.

To register for the lunch meeting, please click here