Talk: Should we tread softly across the uncanny valley?

Abstract: In recent days, virtual humans are increasing in popularity across many different domains. Besides their traditional use in gaming, and VFX, we are now seeing a huge increase in their use in newer applications such as AR/VR, video conferencing, social media influencers and youtubers, virtual assistants, or for therapy/learning. In the next 5 years, we will become much more accustomed to conversing with virtual humans for a range of tasks. However, research on the perception of virtual humans is not advancing as quickly, and we are lacking knowledge on how humans really perceive these types of interactions - do they register as real human encounters or an interaction with a robot? Achieving photorealism will surely make this distinction more difficult in the future. In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent research on the perception of virtual and augmented humans, focusing on the effect of photorealism.

Bio: Rachel McDonnell is an Associate Professor of Creative Technologies at Trinity College Dublin, and a principal investigator with ADAPT, Trinity’s Centre for AI-driven Digital Content Technology. She combines research in cutting-edge computer graphics and investigating the perception of virtual characters to both deepen our understanding of how virtual humans are perceived, and directly provide new algorithms and guidelines for industry developers on where to focus their efforts. She has published over 100 papers in conferences and journals in her field, including many top-tier publications at venues such as SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, TOCHI, and IEEE TVCG, etc. She has served as Associate Editor journals such as ACM Transactions on Applied Perception and Computer Graphics Forum, and a regular member of many international program committees (including ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics). She was recently elected a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.