Virtual Reality Psychodramas

By Roland Piquepaille

Researchers at the University of Buffalo (UB) are producing immersive virtual reality (VR) dramas in which the users are given some goals at the beginning and are interacting with 'self-aware' computational agents. The UB Reporter writes that they are putting a new face on 'user-friendly' VR environments. They already created a psychodrama called "The Trial The Trail" in which "the user is given two companions named Filopat and Patofil and told that at the end of her experience she will get her heart's desire." And because the software agents are continuously improving and 'improvising' around human users, the show is different every time. I don't know if this will lead to some mainstream application, but I'm sure that the researchers had lots of fun in their CAVEs-like systems.

Here is the introduction from the UB Reporter.

A virtual-reality drama by UB researchers -- aimed at transforming the movie-going experience -- is driving the development of increasingly "self-aware" computational agents that are able to improvise responses to the spontaneous actions of human users.

These improvisational computer agents are expected to influence the development of electronic devices of tomorrow, making them much more user-friendly because they will be able to respond to the idiosyncratic needs of each user.

Here are more explanations.

By necessity, said professor Stuart C. Shapiro, those characters are computational agents that must be capable of behaving in sophisticated and very human-like ways, attributes that also can help take "user-friendliness" for computers and other electronic devices to new heights.

"This is a step in the design and implementation of computer agents that are aware of themselves and their actions, as well as the environment they are in," he explained, "so this work is relevant to any application in which people interact with a device or system."

	Here is a storyboard image of the stage of their "The Trial The Trail" project with Patofil, Filopat and the user as the green figure (Credit: University of Buffalo).
	And here is Patofil alone (Credit: University of Buffalo).

You also can see a video clip of "The Trial The Trail" project (54.7 MB, so be cautious).

And here are some of the reasons why this project is pretty unusual.

While other computer scientists are exploring multiple agent systems, he continued, this project is more demanding because the agents in the drama must be able to "perceive" themselves and then respond to the user.

So, as the human user proceeds through the drama, his or her actions are being recorded computationally over the Internet, interpreted psychologically and used to prompt the responses by the virtual characters.

Because of this, the drama is different every time, a factor that the researchers say is both a more challenging and exciting type of entertainment, while also more computationally demanding.

For more technical information, you can read this technical paper published in 2004 under the title "Psycho-Drama in VR" (PDF format, 12 pages, 220 KB). The above illustrations were extracted from this paper.

Will this research effort lead to something useful? I've no idea, but I'm sure I would have like to be involved in this project if my hometown was Buffalo instead of Paris.

Source: Ellen Goldbaum, The University of Buffalo Reporter, March 3, 2005, Volume 36, Number 24

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• AI
  
• Displays
  
• Movies
  
• Virtual Reality
  
• Vision and Visualization