Simulating listener gaze and evaluating its effect on human speakers

Abstract

This paper presents an agent architecture designed as part of a multidisciplinary collaboration between embodied agents development and psycho-linguistic experimentation. This collaboration will lead to an empirical study involving an interactive human-like avatar following participants’ gaze. Instead of adapting existing “off the shelf” embodied agents solutions, experimenters and developers collaboratively designed and implemented experiment’s logic and the avatar’s real time behavior from scratch in the Blender environment following an agile methodology. Frequent iterations and short implementation sprints allowed the experimenters to focus on the experiment and test many interaction scenarios in a short time.