Toward a Scoping Review of Social Intelligence in Virtual Humans

As the demand for socially intelligent Virtual Humans (VHs) increases, so follows the demand for effective and efficient cross-discipline collaboration that is required to bring these VHs “to life”. One avenue for increasing cross-discipline fluency is the aggregation and organization of seemingly disparate areas of research and development (e.g., graphics and emotion models) that are essential to the field of VH research. Our initial investigation (1) identifies and catalogues research streams concentrated in three multidisciplinary VH topic clusters within the domain of social intelligence, Emotion, Social Behavior, and The Face, (2) brings to the forefront key themes and prolific authors within each topic cluster, and (3) provides evidence that a full scoping review is warranted to further map the field, aggregate research findings, and identify gaps in the research. To enable collaboration, we provide full access to the refined VH cluster datasets, key word and author word clouds, as well as interactive evidence maps.