With current advances in 3D graphics on the web and Internet speeds, the use of web-based conversational virtual humans has shown great potential to improve population health. Prior work has shown that virtual humans are effective in promoting positive health behaviors. They enable face-to-face conversations like a real human while maintaining anonymity for users in difficult conversations. As they are deployed via the web, they can be standardized and targeted to large populations at reduced costs.
However, the development of virtual humans often requires computer science expertise, which makes the adoption of virtual human technology challenging for non-computer science experts. The time, cost, and expertise required to develop and deploy virtual humans on the web can lead experts from non-computer science domains to avoid virtual human technology. To increase the adoption of virtual human technology in different domains, a system called Virtual Interviewer Platform (VIP) has been developed.
VIP enables the rapid development of conversational virtual humans and allows users to interact with virtual humans via web browsers. To generate a virtual human interaction, the domain experts have to write a conversational script. The conversational script is then used by VIP to generate a web link wherein users can interact with a virtual human. The user interaction with a virtual human is saved by the system for later analysis. The VIP system is capable of multiple interaction modalities, including multiple-choice buttons and free-text.
Here are other details related to the platform:
Signup here - https://vipdev.virtualpeoplefactory.com
How to write a conversational script - https://github.com/inkle/ink/blob/master/Documentation/WritingWithInk.md
Mac/Windows software to write the conversational script - https://github.com/inkle/inky/releases/tag/0.11.0
Related Publications:
Zalake, M., Siqueira, Gomes de, A., Krishna, V., Antonenko, P., Hamza-Lup, F., & Benjamin, L. (2020). Towards Rapid Development of Conversational Virtual Humans using Web3D Technologies. The 25th International Conference on 3DWeb Technology (Web3D’20). Learn More