Simulated Crowd: Towards a Synthetic Culture for Engaging a Learner in Culture-dependent Nonverbal Interaction

Abstract

Difficulties in living in a different culture are caused by different patterns of thinking, feeling and potential actions. A good way to experience cultural immersion is to walk in a crowd. This paper proposes a simulated crowd as a novel tool for allowing people to practice culture-specific nonverbal communication behaviors. We present a conceptual framework of a simulated crowd using an immersive interactive environment. We discuss technical challenges concerning a simulated crowd, including realtime eye gaze recognition in a dynamic moving situation, sensing of nonverbal behaviors using multiple range sensors, and behavior generation based on novel temporal data mining algorithms.