Title

Human Surrogates: Remote Presence For Collaboration And Education In Smart Cities

Abstract

A human surrogate is any object, virtual, physical or even a blend of virtual and physical, that acts as a stand-in for a human. Surrogates can be directly controlled or just given a specific task to carry out on behalf of a human. In the context of a virtual environment, a surrogate is more often referred to as an avatar, reflecting that it is intended to represent the person in some context, rather than just carrying out a specific task on his or her behalf. In essence, an avatar is a manifestation of the human who is "inhabiting" it. A person's avatar can look like the inhabiter or look like some other person, or even be a personification of some non-human character Generally, the inhabiter controls all critical actions, verbal and non-verbal, of his or her avatar, although the specific manifestation of the avatar may place constraints on how it carries out some of these desired behaviors. The research presented here involves the use of avatars and other forms of human surrogates as remote entities that can be employed for situations that involve interpersonal skills. More specifically, we focus on the use of avatars in collaborative situations and in the delivery of training and education, especially when physical co-presence is difficult or even undesirable. In these contexts, difficulty most often relates to spatial separation of the human participants and undesirability relates to the need to have one's surrogate present an appearance and exist in a context that differs from one's own. For other situations, such as carrying out dangerous or humanly impossible physical tasks, a remote avatar may be required for safety or even successful completion. In Smart Cities, human surrogates and avatars can help make people more effective, safer, better educated and more facile at learning new skills required for employment and other life events. Our first example of the use of avatars is for teacher preparation. Here we focus on rehearsal of classroom management, content delivery and pedagogical techniques. The system we have developed to help potential and existing teachers learn new skills and hone old ones is called TeachLivE™, which stands for teaching and learning in a virtual environment. TeachLivE is in current use at over 50 universities and four school districts in the US, and one university in the United Arab Emirates. In comparison to learning skills in an actual classroom, TeachLivE harms no real children and it gives teachers the opportunity to reflect objectively on their performances, reentering the virtual classroom at a later time to improve their performances. What TeachLivE presents to its users is a virtual classroom of students, each representing the profile of a commonly encountered personality. Two extremes in current TeachLivE scenarios are a virtual student named Sean who is an aggressive-dependent in constant need of his teacher's attention and approval, and Maria who is an exceptionally talented passive-independent with no perceived need for the teacher's help or approval. Beyond personalities, each virtual student has a deep backstory and a variety of representative misconceptions related to subject matter appropriate for the student's age group - at present we have middle and high school classes, with elementary in preparation. TeachLivE is built on a platform called the AMITIES™ framework. AMITIES, which stands for Avatar-Mediated Interactive Training and Individualized Experience System, serves as middleware between the 3D rendering system (presently the industry-standard UNITY game engine) and a scenario authoring system. The AMITIES framework provides an efficient and effective infrastructure for human-in-the loop simulated experiences. Much of the system's uniqueness lies in its flexibility, allowing for a single person to simultaneously inhabit multiple avatars as well as multiple people to control multiple or even a single avatar. Achieving this has involved the development of inhabiter paradigms that focus on low cognitive and physical demand and participant paradigms that focus on situational plausibility and place illusion, plus a network protocol that delivers animated behaviors, including facial and body gestures, with very little bandwidth requirement. In addition to TeachLivE, the following is a sampling of existing uses of the AMITIES framework:. Assist trainers in employing reflective strategies.. Control robotic manifestations in remote environments.. Help students and others build protective strategies.. Improve social and job skills for children with autism.. Prepare employees for a corporation's unique culture.

Publication Date

11-7-2014

Publication Title

EMASC 2014 - Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Emerging Multimedia Applications and Services for Smart Cities, Workshop of MM 2014

Number of Pages

1-2

Document Type

Article; Proceedings Paper

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/2661704.2661712

Socpus ID

84919454643 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84919454643

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