Crafting Realistic Virtual Humans: Unveiling Perspectives on Human Perception, Crowds, and Embodied Conversational Agents

Virtual Humans (VHs) were first developed more than 50 years ago and have undergone significant advancements since then. In the past, creating and animating VHs was a complex task. However, contemporary commercial and freely available technology now empowers users, programmers, and designers to create and animate VHs with relative ease. These technologies have even reached a point where they can replicate the authentic characteristics and behaviors of real actors, resulting in VHs that are visually convincing and behaviorally lifelike. This paper explores three closely related research areas in the context of virtual humans and discusses the far-reaching implications of highly realistic characters within these domains.