CLOSE
PRINT
Jeremy Bailenson, Communication Department, "Transformed Social Interaction in Immersive Virtual Reality"
ABSTRACT:
"Over time, our mode of remote communication has evolved from written
letters to telephones, email, internet chat rooms, and videoconferences.
Similarly, collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) promise to further
change the nature of remote interaction. CVEs are systems which track
verbal and nonverbal signals of multiple interactants and render those
signals onto avatars, three-dimensional, digital representations of people
in a shared digital space. In this talk, I describe a series of projects
that explore the manners in which CVEs can qualitatively change the nature
of remote communication. Unlike telephone conversations and
videoconferences, interactants in CVEs have the ability to utilize
Transformed Social Interaction, systematically filtering the physical
appearance and behavioral actions of their avatars in the eyes of their
conversational partners, amplifying or suppressing features and nonverbal
signals in real-time for strategic purposes. These transformations can have
a drastic impact on interactants' persuasive and instructional abilities.
Furthermore, using CVEs, behavioral researchers can use this mismatch
between performed and perceived behavior as a tool to examine complex
patterns of nonverbal behavior with nearly perfect experimental control and
great precision."
BIO:
Jeremy Bailenson earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. After receiving his doctorate, he spent four years at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.
Bailenson's main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He explores the manner in which people are able to represent themselves when the physical constraints of body and veridically-rendered behaviors are removed. Furthermore, he designs and studies collaborative virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal interaction.
http://communication.stanford.edu/faculty/bailenson.html