Modeling Social Interaction with Virtual Characters

Dear Colleagues,

Virtual characters are essential in the research field of human–computer interactions. They are employed in a wide range of application areas, e.g., gaming, assisting, training, and therapeutic support. Within these areas, they are used for various tasks, beginning with interactively conveying information, simulating socially challenging behavior, to consoling patients in challenging situations. Many of these tasks require virtual characters to show social competence (e.g., awareness, engagement, or even trust and empathy). A realization of social competences involves expertise from many different areas and involves a technological adaptation on various levels.

Modeling the social interaction abilities of virtual characters requires a deep understanding of situational context and internal affective states and their relation to observable signals (head, body, voice, etc.). Approaches have to consider individual cultural values; models of perspective-taking; or, more generally, empathy, techniques of multi-modal language understanding, as well as techniques of recognition of social signals and context information. Besides this, virtual characters need to express and adapt their social behavior according to the current interaction state, role, and task, and other information in order to remain socially believable.

This Special Issue aims for high-quality research articles that address broad challenges in the area of modelling individual and group social interactions with virtual characters. From a research point of view, models that go beyond the state of the art, like hybrid models of social interaction that combine machine learning models with theory-driven cognitive models about social aspects. The employment of such an approach is the basis of understanding and explaining social behavior, which should be mandatory for social virtual characters. This comes along with new and extended ways of how such technology can be evaluated. Future approaches might include subjective evaluation through questionnaires, together with objective evaluation based on behavioral, (neuro-) physiological cues, and even experimental protocols (e.g., perceptive tasks versus user-involved interactions). Related to this area are studies, technological concepts, and ethical considerations that take all kinds of social aspects (and their realization) into account, e.g., promote prosocial behavior, models of fairness in combination with culture, or social politeness and repair strategies with regard to perspective taking and empathy.

Dr. Patrick Gebhard
Dr. Magalie Ochs
Dr. Tobias Baur
Guest Editors

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