Embodied Human Computer Interaction

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that embodiment can play an important role in the design and modeling of systems developed for Human Computer Interaction. To this end, we describe a simulation platform for building Embodied Human Computer Interactions (EHCI). This system, VoxWorld, enables multimodal dialogue systems that communicate through language, gesture, action, facial expressions, and gaze tracking, in the context of task-oriented interactions. A multimodal simulation is an embodied 3D virtual realization of both the situational environment and the co-situated agents, as well as the most salient content denoted by communicative acts in a discourse. It is built on the modeling language VoxML (Pustejovsky and Krishnaswamy in VoxML: a visualization modeling language, proceedings of LREC, 2016), which encodes objects with rich semantic typing and action affordances, and actions themselves as multimodal programs, enabling contextually salient inferences and decisions in the environment. VoxWorld enables an embodied HCI by situating both human and artificial agents within the same virtual simulation environment, where they share perceptual and epistemic common ground. We discuss the formal and computational underpinnings of embodiment and common ground, how they interact and specify parameters of the interaction between humans and artificial agents, and demonstrate behaviors and types of interactions on different classes of artificial agents.