Project Leader Gale Lucas
The US Armed Services, including the US Army, spends a significant amount of money and effort customizing virtual environments for new physical locations. While this might be essential for mission planning activities, it may not be needed for training applications such as navigation or wayfinding, training of interpersonal skills, negotiation, etc. The project addresses this by systematically studying the impact of virtual environments (e.g., base vs. field, rural vs. urban, etc.) on responses during training and/or simulation (e.g., training outcomes, stress, impressions of virtual human characters in the environment, etc.), potentially saving money and effort by helping the Army to avoid customizing virtual environments for new locations when its not necessary. It tests how design factors (e.g., social cues given by virtual humans, presence of virtual humans across task/context, etc.) and techniques (e.g., sensing of facial, emotional displays) in affective computing can be used to facilitate teaming relationships in virtual contexts.
Recent Publications
- A. Bellas et al., “Rapport Building with Social Robots as a Method for Improving Mission Debriefing in Human-Robot Teams,” 2020 Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium (SIEDS), Charlottesville, VA, USA, 2020, pp. 160-163, doi: 10.1109/SIEDS49339.2020.9106643.
- de Gennaro M, Krumhuber EG, Lucas G. Effectiveness of an Empathic Chatbot in Combating Adverse Effects of Social Exclusion on Mood. Front Psychol. 2020;10:3061. Published 2020 Jan 23. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03061
- Saba Khashe, Gale Lucas, Burcin Becerik-Gerber & Jonathan Gratch (2019) Establishing Social Dialog between Buildings and Their Users, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 35:17, 1545-1556, DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2018.1555346