M. Slater
{"title":"Do Avatars Dream of Digital Sheep? Virtual People and the Sense of Presence","authors":"M. Slater","doi":"10.1109/VR.2002.10001","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Philip K. Dick's celebrated book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner) explored the complex relationships between humans and almost perfect humanoid androids known as “replicants.” It grapples with the moral difficulties involved in the termination of beings who look and behave like humans. There is a worldwide endeavor to create parallel virtual world’s populated by virtual characters (avatars) alongside humans. Will such avatars be believable in the sense that human responses to them will be appropriate? Will your interactions with a weeping avatar make you cry, a laughing avatar make you laugh? This talk will explore these issues taking as evidence experiments that have examined the relationships between people and avatars in the context of cognitive behavioural therapy for social phobia, and paranoid ideation. The results are used also as a background to explore the notion of the sense of presence in virtual environments. Mel Slater joined University College London as a Reader in Computer Graphics in November 1995. He became full Professor of Virtual Environments in 1997. Before that he was at Queen Mary, University of London, Head of Department of Computer Science from 1993-95. He was visiting Professor in Computer Science Division, University of California Berkeley, in the spring semesters 1991 and 1992, and Visiting Scientist at the MIT Research Laboratory for Electronics, Sensory Communications Group, January-April 1998. His research has concentrated on immersive virtual environments since 1991, since when he has been principal investigator of several UK and European funded projects. He led the European FIVE ESPRIT Working Group (Framework for Immersive Virtual Environments). He was PI for a Wellcome Foundation project on using Virtual Environments for therapy in the context of social phobias and fear of public speaking. He is PI for almost £900,000 funding, under the 1998-99 JREI competition, for a virtual reality Cave-like system set up in the Department of Computer Science. He is guest editor of five special editions of the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments (MIT Press), and was recently appointed co-Editor-in-Chief of that journal. Since 1989 fourteen of his PhD students have obtained their PhDs, and he is currently supervising six full-time students, all in the area of computer graphics and virtual environments. He leads the ‘Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics’ research team, consisting of approximately 20 researchers. He is an Engineering and Physical Sciences (EPSRC) Senior Research Fellow from October 1999 for five years working on the Virtual Light Field approach to computer graphics rendering, and has recently received further EPSRC funding amounting to £350,000 for a project in this area. Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality 2002 (VR02) 1087-8270/02 $17.00 © 2002 IEEE","PeriodicalId":74561,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings. IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces","volume":"39 1","pages":"3-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2002-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"7","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings. IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2002.10001","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 7