Multi-party interaction with a virtual character and a human-like robot

Abstract

Research on interactive virtual characters and social robots focuses mainly on one-to-one interactions and multi-party interactions concept are rather less explored. As we are developing these characters to be helpful to us in our daily lives as guides, companions, assistants or receptionists, they should be aware of the existence of multiple people and address their requirements in a natural way and act according to the social rules and norms. In contrast with previous work, we are interested in multi-party and multi-modal interactions between 3D virtual characters, real humans and social robots. This means that any of these participants can interact with each other. In this paper we present our on-going work, provide a discussion on multi-party interaction, describe the overall system architecture and mention our future work.