Non-verbal communication in virtual environments

Name: Ingmar Goudt

Discipline: Human-Computer Interaction

email address: i.goudt@student.tudelft.nl

Project

Project: Non-verbal communication in virtual environments

Research Goals

Everyone uses nonverbal communication in their daily life. You can support and direct your verbal communication with it, but it can also reflect your mood or position towards others. Nonverbal communication is something we don't learn directly, but rather develop these skills by mirroring other's behaviour and some nonverbal cues are even genetically inherited. Although everyone uses and recognizes nonverbal cues and everyone considers it trivial and natural, it is hard to say why you actually use those specific cues.

The goal of this research project is to bring nonverbal communication to a virtual world. The main focus is to find out which types of nonverbal communication, made by avatars, have the same response to people as it would have in real life. And if a particular nonverbal cue has a different response, what could be the reason for that and in what way could the response be elevated or degrated?

This results of this research project could help to increase the fidelity of avatars in virtual worlds.