Psychoinformatics 2015

I’m am currently at a new conference called ‘Psychoinformatics: where Psychology meets Informatics‘. The conference is about the interfaces between Psychology and Computer Science. This is very much the space I have been working in for the last number of years, so it should be interesting.

I’m giving four talks during the course of the conference:

• The Virtual Human: The ideal confederate
  Virtual Reality provides the ability to experiment in situ for most any situation, while remaining in a controlled laboratory. Virtual Humans (Avatars) extend that power to social settings, providing controlled, consistent, financially scalable, and untiring performances.
• Applying perception to virtual problems
  Virtual Reality (and myself) developed out of highly technical disciplines. However, VR problems are not all solvable by technical solutions. VR differs itself from the current and previous generation computer games by its perceptual issues. As such, perceptual approaches are necessary.
• Virtual Human seeks Psychologist for validation
  Has a deep, unfulfilled need to help others. Has trouble being accepted by psychologists, but not with general public. Seeks direction and partnership in forging new paths.
• The Virtual Human: Where we are in the pixel to people spectrum
  For computer science, avatars are usually just pixels. For psychologists, they are more like people. In this talk, I will discuss the current state of avatar technologies in that spectrum and the challenges that still exist in creating and using virtual humans. The focus will be on the perceptual and application side of the topic rather than technical side.

Part of this is look at the past, about my prior work. But most is about the future, about how we can use Virtual Reality and specifically Virtual Humans in Psychology research. Excited for the discussions.