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Conference Paper
Continuous and Interpretable Empathic Behaviors for Embodied Intelligent Virtual Agents
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- Authors
- Yongho Lee, Heesook Shin, Gun A. Lee, Youn-Hee Gil
- Issue Date
- 2026-03
- Citation
- Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) 2026, pp.1421-1422
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Language
- English
- Type
- Conference Paper
- Abstract
- We present a research demo of an embodied intelligent virtual agent (IVA) for empathic human-agent communication in immersive extended reality (XR). The agent supports low-latency streaming conversation using a commercial artificial intelligence (AI) service and synchronizes speech with viseme-driven lip sync and facial dynamics. During communication, the agent's empathy state and nonverbal behaviors are computed from user interaction data, including gaze, facial expressions, gestures, and vocal features. The empathy state integrates understanding-oriented and affect-oriented components, enabling the agent to express empathic behavior through eye contact, nodding, mimicry, body proximity, and facial expression in a continuous and interpretable manner. Our demo highlights the potential of grounding empathic IVA behavior in empirical observations of externally expressed empathy in dyadic XR commuications.
- Keyword
- Intelligent virtual agent, empathy, external expression, extended reality
- KSP Keywords
- Agent communication, Facial expression, Human-agent, Intelligent virtual agents, Interaction data, Lip sync, Low-Latency Streaming, Non-verbal behavior, User interaction, artificial intelligence, empirical observations