School of Health Sciences and Social Work
Successful PhD funded by the Expert Centre (now the Centre for Simulation in Healthcare)
Wed, 22 Aug 2012 10:51:00 BST
Aryel Beck has successfully completed a PhD exploring the use of Virtual Reality for social task training (e.g. medical training). These types of Virtual Environments use emotional animated characters. Even though emotions have a strong influence on human-human interactions, typical system evaluation does not assess whether human and animated emotional displays are perceived similarly by observers. Aryel’s thesis explored how emotional body language displayed by animated characters is perceived.
Aryel was supervised by Dr. Brett Stevens, Professor Kim Bard and Dr. Guy Van de Walle. The PhD was funded by the Expert Centre and was based in the School of Creative Technology. Aryel is now a full time research fellow in the School of Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire as part of the ALIZ-E project which aims to contribute to the development of naturally interacting and socially accepted robots. The project focuses on interactions with children in a hospital context (http://www.aliz-e.org/).
The Expert Centre has now become part of the School of Health Sciences and Social Work as the Centre for Simulation in Healthcare.