Page 51 - TLU magazine - The Way to The Top

VIRTUALMEETINGS
for human purposes
Research professor of Tallinn University Pia Tikka, together with her research team, wishes to broaden the comprehensive understanding of what the test subject experiences when they meet a screen character eye-to-eye in virtual reality. This offers new knowledge on interaction between humans and machines.
Recently the amount of research on interactive artificial agents has increased drastically. How- ever, the rules of social context that greatly limit the wide use of research results are generally left out. In practical fields, the use of artificial char- acters on-screen is well established, especially in computer games; however, their edu-
cational and medical potential is far from being used entirely.
Current work in our Enac- tive Virtuality Lab puts people and artificial agents like them in socially difficult situa- tions that are expressed
by storytelling. We take
stories as models of hu-
man thinking activities.
This means that a story is a cognitive tool through which people explain chains of events and their location in the world.
Virtual people are like companions
We put artificial agents in different educational, medical and social roles taking into consideration possible socio-emotional, health and ethical dimensions. As a hypothesis, we presume that a carefully chosen collection of human problems helps recognise ethically sustainable solutions.
As an example, offering a virtual companion to the lonely elderly – will virtual people of this kind be accepted as companions? Even though virtual agents can not replace the presence of
a person, they can be useful in several areas of human life. How would loneliness be affected
by the presence of an empathic virtual human face in daily life?
One of our ongoing projects touches on the training of medical and forensic employees in which virtual people are used to interview vul-
nerable persons i.e. rape victims. This is a follow-up project to the research of
TU legal psychology associate professor Kristjan Kask and
his co-workers, which was focused on interviewing
vulnerable children.
The second field of ap- plication is simulating
face-to-face meetings of immigrants with
different profiles at the country border. However,
unfinished project Booth tries to model the social situa-
tion through technology on one hand, and on the other hand deals
with the social and political matters of this kind of meeting. One other purpose is to explore the idea of open-minded acceptance interviews.
We are also working on other exiting ventures. All of those include several research fields and the academic establishments and media indus- try of other countries.
Mobilitas Pluss top researchers grant project ”Enactive co- presence in narrative virtual reality – a triadic interaction model” started on 1 September 2017 and ending on 31 Au- gust 2022. The budget, €662,049, is funded by the Estonian Research Council. Principal Investigator: Research professor at TU Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School Pia Tikka.
Research professor Pia Tikka
TALLINN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE / NO. 14 / SPRING 2020
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