UNCC College of Computing and Informatics

Graduate Seminar (2008 Spring)

Title: Is It Friendship if One of Us is Computed and Rendered?

Larry F. Hodges, Ph.D.

Professor and Chair

Department of Computer Science

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

January 11 at 3:00pm
106 Woodward

Abstract:

Digital Characters are everywhere! Avatars, ChatBots, Virtual Humans, Virtual Characters, and Embodied Agents are increasingly ubiquitous in commercial web sites, movies, games, online communities, and training applications. What do we know about these guys? Can Digital Characters effectively do jobs currently done by humans? What causes us to like or dislike interacting with Digital Characters? Can we learn social skills by interacting with Digital Characters? Can we build a Digital Character such that the social and psychological responses of a person to the Digital Character are similar to the responses evoked by another person? My work in the Future Computing Lab at UNC Charlotte for the past five years has focused on these and other questions. In this talk I will give a brief survey of the digital characters we have built and studied, and what we have learned about human-virtual human interaction.

Bio:

Larry F. Hodges joined the computer science faculty at Georgia Tech in 1988 after receiving his Ph.D. at North Carolina State University. His dissertation was in the area of stereoscopic computer graphics under the Direction of Professor David McAllister in the Department of Computer Science. At Georgia Tech he was a founding member of the Graphics, Visualization & Usability (GVU) Center and also led the Virtual Environments Research Group which focused on the rapidly emerging area of Virtual Reality.

In 1993 he organized a multidisciplinary team of clinicians and computer scientists who began to investigate the use of VR for exposure therapy of phobias. This work resulted in the 1995 publication of Effectiveness of computer-generated (virtual reality) graded exposure in the treatment of acrophobia in the American Journal of Psychiatry. This paper was the first published report of a controlled study on the use of VR for psychotherapy in the psychiatric literature and received wide media attention, including an announcement of the paper’s results on CBS Evening News the day the journal article was released and follow-up stories in a number of venues, including Scientific American Frontiers, CNN, Dateline NBC, Good Morning America, US News & World Report, MIT Technology Review, Discover, and the New York Times. Since that first study he has continued to expand the development of what has become known as VR Therapy or Virtual Therapy with two patents and over 25 journal publications in the clinical psychology and psychiatry literature on various clinical applications of VR, including treatment of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, Fear of Flying, Social Phobias, and Balance Disorders.

In 1996 he, with research colleague Barbara Rothbaum of Emory University, founded Virtually Better, Inc., a company that specializes in creation, testing, and sales of virtual environments for clinical applications in psychiatry, psychology, and addiction. Virtually Better Therapy systems are currently in use by clinicians in many locations across the US and in eleven other countries. In 2006, Dr. Hodges was awarded the IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award for his work in clinical virtual reality.

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