PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In Virtual Reality environments, real humans can meet virtual humans to collaborate on tasks. The agent Max is such a virtual human. In construction tasks, he is standing face-to-face to a human partner as a co-situated companion. To maintain a social conversation, Max has to perceive the user’s engagement and to solicit the user’s engagement, he needs to demonstrate engagement himself. This paper presents ongoing work on the development of a model that describes interacting levels of engagement. We present how the agent’s perceptive, cognitive, and expressive capabilities interact on these levels ranging from observing the human partner, to taking her goals, mental state or emotions into account when making decisions on how to interact and intervene.