Abstract:

Over time, our mode of remote communication has evolved from written letters to
telephones, email, internet chat rooms, and videoconferences.  Similarly,
collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) promise to further change the nature
of remote interaction. CVEs are systems which track verbal and nonverbal
signals of multiple interactants and render those signals onto avatars,
three-dimensional, digital representations of people in a shared digital space.
In this talk, I describe a series of projects that explore the manners in which
CVEs qualitatively change the nature of remote communication. Unlike telephone
conversations and videoconferences, interactants in CVEs have the ability to
systematically filter the physical appearance and behavioral actions of their
avatars in the eyes of their conversational partners, amplifying or suppressing
features and nonverbal signals in real-time for strategic purposes. These
transformations have a drastic impact on interactants? persuasive and
instructional abilities.  Furthermore, using CVEs, behavioral researchers can
use this mismatch between performed and perceived behavior as a tool to examine
complex patterns of nonverbal behavior with nearly perfect experimental control
and great precision. Implications for communications systems and social
interaction will be discussed.

Bio:

Jeremy Bailenson earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in
1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999.
After receiving his doctorate, he spent four years at the Research Center for
Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa
Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor. He
currently is the director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

Bailenson's main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human
representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He
explores the manner in which people are able to represent themselves when the
physical constraints of body and veridically-rendered behaviors are removed.
Furthermore, he designs and studies collaborative virtual reality systems that
allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the
manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal
interaction.

His work has been published in several academic journals, including Cognitive
Psychology, Discourse Processes, Human Communication Research, Psychological
Science, and PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, and his research
is funded by the National Science Foundation, Stanford University, and by
various Silicon Valley and international corporations.