In a virtual world, would you cross a street to avoid a group of young black men?
Understanding if virtual humans can elicit such real-world biases in people is the foundation of a research project titled, "Studying Diversity Issues with Immersive Virtual Humans." This project applies virtual humans to simulating interpersonal scenarios. Through interacting with a diverse group of virtual humans, students can be educated on ethnic and racial issues.
Dr. Benjamin Lok, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, recently received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to investigate fundamental questions about virtual humans. The NSF sponsored Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is one of the most prestigious awards for new faculty members. The CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century, according to the NSF Web site. The NSF award provides more than $400,000 over five years.
Dr. Lok's research group "the Virtual Experiences Research Group (VERG)" is working on mixed reality and virtual reality technologies to create compelling virtual experiences. Specifically, the group focuses on rendering, interacting, visualizing, and studying highly immersive virtual humans. Their work has evolved into the Inter-Personal Simulator (IPS) system. The virtual humans in IPS are similar to those in video games; however the IPS virtual humans are life-size and interact with speech, gestures, eye gaze, and body language.
Dr. Lok is collaborating with faculty in the College of Medicine and College of Education to apply the IPS to simulate the interaction between a virtual patient (VP) and doctor. VPs provide medical students additional opportunities to practice communication skills. It is within this framework that the group is using virtual humans to study diversity issues.
End-user studies are being conducted that observe medical students interviewing VPs of differing ethnicities. In each medical student-VP interaction, the IPS system tracks many communication cues, including posture, speech, gaze, and language. For each medical student, their interactions with VPs of different ethnicities or races are compared to identify systematic differences. These differences are later presented to the student using a visualization system that allows the student to replay and review the interaction. The IPS visualization system even allows the medical student to replay the conversation from the VP's eyes - in essence seeing what it was like to talk to yourself! Future virtual humans will also have varied ages, weight and levels of intelligence.
The goal is to have the VP system in teaching and practicing hospitals worldwide. The system uses only commodity-off-the-shelf components, and its total cost is less than $8000. The virtual patients system has been tested at three medical schools, the University of Florida, the Medical College of Georgia, and Keele University (U.K.).
This project also has a strong education component. With hundreds of new medical students each year, the ability to provide additional training opportunities would directly impact health care. Further, the technologies developed will also be incorporated into CISE courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics. There are also opportunities for undergraduates (especially motivated sophomores and juniors) to be involved with this research. Please forward all inquiries to Dr. Benjamin Lok (lok@cise.ufl.edu).
Dr. Lok received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002 and joined the CISE faculty at the University of Florida in 2003.
