Socially Aware Virtual Characters: The Social Signal of Smiles [Social Sciences]

At first, machines were mainly used to solve complex mathematical problems. Today, they often embody more and more roles typically endowed by humans, such as a tutor in a virtual learning class or an assistant for virtual task realization. Moreover, the paradigm highlighted in [1] reveals that the user´s relation with the computer is intrinsically social, with high similarities compared to interpersonal relationships. For instance, people have no problem using communicative means (verbal and nonverbal behavior) to interact with artificial entities and apply polite rules. One particularly interesting aspect of the human machine interaction is the bidirectionality of the relation: users exhibit social behaviors to the computer, and the machine´s behavior affects users. Reeves and Nass [1] have shown that people tend to react naturally and socially to computers, as they would do to another person. In such a human-machine interaction, which can be seen as a particular social context with users sensitive to the computer behavior, the development of socially aware virtual characters appears fundamental.