Social Applications
Senua from Hellblade
Today, the video game community is a massive 1.2 billion and growing. In these games, you interact an incredible number of virtual humans (animals, aliens, monsters, etc...) and the affects have been studied quite a lot. Much of the research is on how to make these characters better, more human. One of the most recent achievements along this line of thought can be seen in Ninja Theory's new video game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. For this game, developers used highly effecient motion capture techniques and cast a real human, Melina Juergens, as Senua. They had Melina act out various motions then they fit Senua's virtual body to hers. This amalgamation between real motion and virtual character breathes new life into Senua that would not have been possible with animation alone. Since her motion is so close to this human motion, Senua is extremely effective as a virtual character. [20]
One of the research labs a part of USC's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is the Social Simulation Lab. Here, they develop tools like PsychSim, that let other researchers run social situations and gather accurate response data from virtual characters. This project, called the Computational Simulation and Modeling of Society (COSMOS) project, attempts to make tools that can predict outcomes of social situations better and better. They focus on things like "tractable approaches to modeling of theory of mind reasoning and decision-theoretic; descriptive models of human-like decision-making; and automated and data-driven approaches to validate and facilitate authoring of large-scale social simulations."[21] PsychSim, mentioned before, is one such tool. It has been used in a range applications such as ICT’s UrbanSim [22], a game-based training tool used in Army classrooms, and BiLAT [23], a negotiation training program. While not inharently social in itself, virtual humans enhance effective social simulators and allow developers to go beyond previous limitations.
Social Simulator
