The Virtual Skills Lab is an ongoing interdisciplinary project involving experts from academic fields such as Human-Computer-Interaction and User Experience research, sociology and psychology as well as practitioners specialized in training and developing corporate culture and learning technology developers. The project (funded by the Austrian research promotion agency FFG) aims at developing Virtual Reality (VR) scenarios for the training of social skills in the workplace. For this purpose, a scenario was developed in a participatory process together with a group of managers working in an international company. The participants were asked to imagine emotionally difficult situations in their everyday interaction with colleagues. On the basis of this co-creational development of a story line, currently a VR scene is being designed in which users finding themselves in the position of a manager will interact with a fictitious collaborator represented by an avatar. The interaction with the avatar is based on speech recognition and conversational AI technologies.
The presentation aims to share preliminary insights regarding three key aspects:
1) How does our work relate to the state of the field, i.e. to existing solutions on how to model social interaction by combining conversational AI with immersive technologies like VR?
2) What are the major challenges we face with respect to the still limited “spontaneity” in interactions with an AI-based interlocutor in VR?
3) How have these challenges influenced our approach to story-telling? What are our solutions for our first prototype?
More about the conference: https://www.mad-conferences.com/