Date: Monday, Septrember 22nd, 2025, 11:00h-12:00h UTC+2 (CEST)

Speaker: Nuria Pelechano, Associate Professor at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain

Title: Animating Virtual Humans to improve trust, co-presence and embodiment

Abstract: 

The metaverse is rapidly evolving as a new playground for interacting and collaborating with other autonomous agents or avatars controlled by other users. In the real world, there are many aspects of nonverbal behavior and appearance, that influence the way we communicate and build trust with others. Since most communication in the metaverse will be through virtual humans, there is a need to understand how different aspects of these virtual avatars can affect the quality of such interactions and allow us to build trust and enhance co-presence. In this talk, I will focus on simulation and animation aspects that play a critical role in creating engaging virtual humans in VR. I will cover both simulation and animation of groups of autonomous agents interacting with the user, as well as self-avatars representing the user. When interacting with with a group of agents, I will show how incorporating collision beliefs, audio, or vibro-tactile feedback can enhance co-presence and the overall plausibility of the virtual experience. When it comes to our self-avatar, animation quality and multi-sensory feedback can affect embodiment, task performance, and even change our own body image. Finally, I will present some motion reconstruction techniques that can take advantage of current AI trends to provide high quality animation even with few tracking sensors.

Biography:

Nuria Pelechano is an Associate Professor at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain, where she is a member of the Research Center for Visualization, Virtual Reality and Graphics Interaction (ViRVIG). She is the president of the Eurographics Spanish Chapter, and member of the Sociedad Científica Española de Informática (SCIE). She has co-authored two books on Crowd Simulation and has published in journals and conferences on computer graphics and animation. She has participated in projects funded by the EU (MSCA ITN-ETN CLIPE, and HORIZON-101093159-XR4ED), Spanish Government (currently SENDA: TED2021-129761B-I00, and PID2021-122136OB-C21), and USA institutions, and also worked on technology transfer projects regarding crowd evacuation, and applications of Virtual Reality for architecture design. Her research interests include simulation, animation and rendering of crowds, generation of navigation meshes, and studying human-avatar interaction in Virtual Reality.

You can learn more about Nuria’s work on her personal page: https://www.cs.upc.edu/~npelechano/

_{Image: Exploring the Role of Expected Collision Feedback in Crowded Virtual Environments
H. Yun, J.L. Ponton, A. Beacco, C. Andujar, N. Pelechano, IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR). Orlando, USA, March 2024.}

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