Virtual Humans

Imagine a simulated training where the characters you interact with are almost human — they converse, they understand, can reason and exhibit emotions.
One such training program being developed at University of Southern California is Virtual Patients.

Virtual Patients are advanced conversational virtual human agents that have been applied to the psychiatric medical field. These interactive agents portray a patient with a clinical or physical condition and can interact verbally and non-verbally with a clinician in an effort to teach interpersonal skills.

There is a great need to learn interpersonal, interviewing and diagnosis skills as a core competency for psychiatry residents and developing psychotherapists. Schools commonly make use of standardized patients to teach interview skills, however, the diversity of the scenarios standardized patients can characterize is limited by availability of human actors and hard cases such as children and the elderly. Additionally, there is the economic concern related to the time and money needed to train standardized patients. Perhaps most damaging is the “standardization” of standardized patients-will they in fact consistently proffer psychometrically reliable and valid interactions with the training clinicians.

Virtual Patient (VP) technology has evolved to a point where researchers may begin developing mental health applications that make use of virtual reality patients. The ICT Virtual Patient set of projects is an effort to explore this large application area for both military and civilian purposes. We are developing an approach that will allow novice mental health clinicians to conduct an interview with a virtual character that emulates a character with a DSM IV TR disorder. These set of projects illustrate the ways in which a variety of core research components developed at the University of Southern California facilitates the rapid development of mental health applications.

This project differs from others in the following ways:

  • It focuses on making believable, interpretable, and responsive virtual humans that deviate from the norm and express both rational and irrational behaviors (Other groups typically focus on developing rational virtual humans that mimic rationality.)
  • It creates responsive virtual humans that co-habit a virtual world with a human.
  • It seeks to model realistic, well-crafted behaviors for virtual humans

    • Learn more at http://ict.usc.edu/projects/virtual_humans