We are increasingly seeing virtual environments including embodied and socially capable characters. However, with few exceptions, the agents may appear to be socially skilled characters (endowed with believable and engaging facial expressions, body gestures, language and other social behaviours), but they do not assist the humans in increasing their social skills. The major focus has been on replicating or modelling human behaviours. Alternatively, as in the case of pedagogical agents, the goal has been to assist the humans to learn about a certain natural or technical domain. Computer-based simulations of social situations have great potential to be applied to many of the social problems that we find in society and organisations. For example training a call-centre operator how to deal with an angry customer, a supervisor how to resolve an argument between two employees without taking side or how to prioritise and rearrange tasks in a typical day of interruptions.
In this talk we consider simulations to-date, the roles they have played and how they relate along a spectrum of reality. Our current interest is to incorporate ideas from storytelling and drama so that reality becomes less of a focus and somewhat stretched to allow what we call "beyond reality" simulations.
Authors: Debbie Richards
Event: SF08: Embodied Interaction in Mobile, Physical and Virtual Environments Workshop