Keynote: Multisensory Feeling Communication in the Hyperconnected Era

Adrian David Cheok Graduate School of Media Design

Keio University Minato, Tokyo, Japan

This talk outlines new facilities that are arising in the hyperconnected internet era within human media spaces. This allows new embodied interaction between humans, species, and computation both socially and physically, with the aim of novel interactive communication and entertainment. Humans can develop new types of communication environments using all the senses, including touch, taste, and smell, which can increase support for multi-person multi-modal interaction and remote presence. In this talk, we present an alternative ubiquitous computing environment and space based on an integrated design of real and virtual worlds. We discuss some different research prototype systems for interactive communication, culture, and play.

Keynote: What Will Virtual Reality Do For Games?

Anthony Steed Department of Computer Science

University College London London, United Kingdom

In the 1990s, the vision of virtual reality was that in the next generation of human-computer interaction, users would see, hear and touch computer-generated sensory information. It was argued that key to virtual reality was that users were immersed into the virtual world, and that the virtual world surrounds them. The vision required the use of head-mounted displays or CAVE systems, surround audio and a range of user sensing systems.

Needless to say, this vision didn't radically change most users' experience of HCI: the technology was too expensive, too cumbersome and just not easy to access. The use of virtual reality has been confined to a small number of niche high-value applications.

Having said that, over the past couple of years, all the component parts for a virtual reality system have become available in consumer form: position tracking technologies, fast stereo projectors, new head-mounted displays, etc. New opportunities for all forms of HCI, including games, will emerge.

In this talk I will present an argument for how understanding the impact of immersion can inform the design of content for this upcoming wave of virtual reality systems. I will explain some of the recent advances in our understanding about why virtual reality works, and some interesting system decision choices that we have investigated.

Keynote: Computational Modelling of Artificial Behaviour

A Perceptual Approach

Christopher Peters School of Computer Science and Communication

KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Sweden

Models capable of generating effective real-time artificial behaviour are desirable as we seek more convincing artificial companions and adversaries in applications ranging from entertainment to pedagogy. Yet this is an increasingly challenging endeavour as the fidelity of embodiments, whether graphical for virtual agents or physical for robots, continues to advance at a rapid pace and viewer expectations are heightened.

In this talk, I consider obstacles related to the definition, selection and validation of computational models aimed at creating convincing behaviour of individuals and crowds of agents. I will focus especially on the role of perception and the human viewer in attempting to overcome these obstacles, not only for validation, but also for providing further insights for modelling efforts.