Um fator relevante para a aceitação de metáforas de mundos virtuais 3D como interfaces homem máquina é a supressão do fator estranheza. Tal fator decorre da percepção de comportamentos não naturais entre as representações de usuários (avatares) e robôs (NPCs Non Playable Characters) nestes ambientes virtuais e acontece, principalmente, devido a diferenças sutís entre o comportamento esperado de um ser humano e o apresentado pelas representações virtuais (avatares). Ao conjunto de comportamentos exibidos denominamos persona. Assim, uma maneira de reduzir a barreira de estranheza entre usuários interagindo em mundos virtuais 3D é fazendo com que suas representações (avatares) tenham personas convincentes. Os seres humanos tem suas personas regidas por seus tratos emocionais. As interações com o ambiente e com outros seres humanos fornecem estímulos que modificam o estado emocional com relação ao estado de equilíbrio e, consequentemente, alteram o comportamento exterior observado. O estado emocional de equilíbrio pode ser obtido através da análise de corpo de comunicação em linguagem natural do usuário. Neste trabalho é defendida a tese de que através da análise do corpo das interações em linguagem natural de usuários nas mídias sociais é possível estabelecer um modelo de personalidade e persona que pode ser transposto para a representação dos usuários nem mundos virtuais 3D, de forma que as representações tenham comportamentos tais que reduzem o fator de estranheza. O modelo faz uso das interações recentes nas mídias sociais e das interações nos mundos virtuais 3D para determinar o estado emocional imediato e o comportamento instantâneo e é coerente com o paradigma do modelo OCC. Também é demonstrado que este modelo é evolutivo: pela análise contínua do corpo da comunicação é acompanhada a evolução da personalidade do usuário, bem como se adequa continuamente sua persona. Os traços de personalidade são analizados no modelo Big Five (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness) e operacionalizados no modelo PAD (Personality, arousal, dominance). O modelo constrói um campo de personalidade, no espaço PAD, de tal forma que na ausência de excitação o estado emocional do avatar fica em repouso no centro deste campo. As excitações movimentam o estado ao longo dos eixos PAD e provocam mudanças no comportamento observado. A correspondência entre as mudanças de comportamento do avatar e o movimento do estado do usuário no campo emocional aumenta a concordância entre comportamento esperado e observado, reduzindo o fator de estranheza. / A key factor for the acceptance of 3D virtual world mataphor as human machine interface is the suppression of the strangeness factor, which appears due the perception of non natural behaviour in representations of users (avatars) and bots (NPCs). Such perception raises mostly due to subtle differences in expected behavior for a human being and observed behavior in virtual representations (avatars and NPCs). In this work we will call persona the set of exhibited behaviors. Thus, a way of diminishing the strangeness valley is by supplying avatars with convincing personas. Human beings rule their personas with intermediation of their emotional traits. Interactions with environment and other beings supply stimuli that change the emotional state from the equilibrium situation and, consequently, change observed behavior. Idle emotional state can be determined through natural language communication corpora analysis. In this thesis we state that through the analysis of user interactions in social media it is possible to establish a model of personality and persona that can be transposed to their representation in 3D virtual worlds, so such representation exhibits behavior that minimize strangeness. The model uses recent interations of user in social media and his interactions inside the 3D virtual world to establish current behavior and is coherent with OCC paradigm. It is also demonstrated that such model is evolutive: by the continuous analysis of communication corpora the user personality behavior is updated and its persona is continually adjusted. Personality traits are analysed in the Big Five model (neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness) and operationalized in the PAD model (personality, arousal, dominance). A personality field is built such as in the absence of inputs, emotional state lies in the center of this field. Inputs move state along PAD axes and cause changes in the observed behavior. Correspondence between avatar behavior changes and state changes of user regarding its emotional field enhance the compliance between expected and observed behavior, reducing strangeness.

Um fator relevante para a aceitação de metáforas de mundos virtuais 3D como interfaces homem máquina é a supressão do fator estranheza. Tal fator decorre da percepção de comportamentos não naturais entre as representações de usuários (avatares) e robôs (NPCs Non Playable Characters) nestes ambientes virtuais e acontece, principalmente, devido a diferenças sutís entre o comportamento esperado de um ser humano e o apresentado pelas representações virtuais (avatares). Ao conjunto de comportamentos exibidos denominamos persona. Assim, uma maneira de reduzir a barreira de estranheza entre usuários interagindo em mundos virtuais 3D é fazendo com que suas representações (avatares) tenham personas convincentes. Os seres humanos tem suas personas regidas por seus tratos emocionais. As interações com o ambiente e com outros seres humanos fornecem estímulos que modificam o estado emocional com relação ao estado de equilíbrio e, consequentemente, alteram o comportamento exterior observado. O estado emocional de equilíbrio pode ser obtido através da análise de corpo de comunicação em linguagem natural do usuário. Neste trabalho é defendida a tese de que através da análise do corpo das interações em linguagem natural de usuários nas mídias sociais é possível estabelecer um modelo de personalidade e persona que pode ser transposto para a representação dos usuários nem mundos virtuais 3D, de forma que as representações tenham comportamentos tais que reduzem o fator de estranheza. O modelo faz uso das interações recentes nas mídias sociais e das interações nos mundos virtuais 3D para determinar o estado emocional imediato e o comportamento instantâneo e é coerente com o paradigma do modelo OCC. Também é demonstrado que este modelo é evolutivo: pela análise contínua do corpo da comunicação é acompanhada a evolução da personalidade do usuário, bem como se adequa continuamente sua persona. Os traços de personalidade são analizados no modelo Big Five (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness) e operacionalizados no modelo PAD (Personality, arousal, dominance). O modelo constrói um campo de personalidade, no espaço PAD, de tal forma que na ausência de excitação o estado emocional do avatar fica em repouso no centro deste campo. As excitações movimentam o estado ao longo dos eixos PAD e provocam mudanças no comportamento observado. A correspondência entre as mudanças de comportamento do avatar e o movimento do estado do usuário no campo emocional aumenta a concordância entre comportamento esperado e observado, reduzindo o fator de estranheza. / A key factor for the acceptance of 3D virtual world mataphor as human machine interface is the suppression of the strangeness factor, which appears due the perception of non natural behaviour in representations of users (avatars) and bots (NPCs). Such perception raises mostly due to subtle differences in expected behavior for a human being and observed behavior in virtual representations (avatars and NPCs). In this work we will call persona the set of exhibited behaviors. Thus, a way of diminishing the strangeness valley is by supplying avatars with convincing personas. Human beings rule their personas with intermediation of their emotional traits. Interactions with environment and other beings supply stimuli that change the emotional state from the equilibrium situation and, consequently, change observed behavior. Idle emotional state can be determined through natural language communication corpora analysis. In this thesis we state that through the analysis of user interactions in social media it is possible to establish a model of personality and persona that can be transposed to their representation in 3D virtual worlds, so such representation exhibits behavior that minimize strangeness. The model uses recent interations of user in social media and his interactions inside the 3D virtual world to establish current behavior and is coherent with OCC paradigm. It is also demonstrated that such model is evolutive: by the continuous analysis of communication corpora the user personality behavior is updated and its persona is continually adjusted. Personality traits are analysed in the Big Five model (neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness) and operationalized in the PAD model (personality, arousal, dominance). A personality field is built such as in the absence of inputs, emotional state lies in the center of this field. Inputs move state along PAD axes and cause changes in the observed behavior. Correspondence between avatar behavior changes and state changes of user regarding its emotional field enhance the compliance between expected and observed behavior, reducing strangeness.

Innovative technologies and their ability to grow rapidly are known to be a great source of controversy and paranoid reactions amongst people. The aim of this research is to examine the acceptance and perception of the technology of digital supermodels and influencers. This will be done in the global market of end-users where this technology has proliferated or has the potential to emerge. Digital supermodels and influencers were regarded specifically in a marketing context for this research, since the whole essence of their existence is for marketing purposes, and was approached as a new innovative technology. The research was divided into two parts, first was about conducting a questionnaire to analyse people’s acceptance of the technology, more specifically to examine the possible change in their purchasing behaviour. The purpose of the second part of given research was to examine people’s reactions and perception towards this technology through a content analysis of Instagram comments for the Instagram accounts of digital supermodels and influencers. The addressed innovative technology of digital influencers and supermodels is mostly perceived positively or neutrally. The significant amount of neutral positions in both parts of given research states the presence of confusion and the need for answers rather than lack of interest, which is to be addressed by the creators and users of digital avatars in marketing in the fashion industry.

La fée, créature de synthèse sortie du fond des âges, héritière des figures de la mythologie gréco-romaine et des divinités païennes du Moyen Âge, se trouve au cœur de la création artistique chez les auteurs du XIXe siècle comme Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808-1889). En effet, ce dernier met en scène d’étranges personnages féminins, dotés de grands pouvoirs et qui semblent, par leurs traits énigmatiques, s’apparenter à la fée médiévale, sœur par excellence de la Parque romaine et de la Moire grecque. Car, aussi bien dans L'Ensorcelée (1854), Un Prêtre marié (1864) que dans Une Vieille Maîtresse (1851), pour ne citer que ces trois exemples, la nature érotique des êtres féeriques paraît se combiner à leur essence prophétique et divinatoire. Ce travail,qui porte sur les aspects les plus significatifs de la fée dans les œuvres romanesques de Barbey à savoir l'érotisme et la divination, s’articule autour de trois parties : la première, intitulée peinture de la fée, dresse une typologie en se fondant sur les figures matricielles de la fée marraine et de la fée amante ; la deuxième, l'univers de la fée, se propose d’analyser l’espace ou l'univers sulfureux dans lequel se meut cet être énigmatique. Cette poétique des lieux vise à rendre perceptible l’illusion du surnaturel et du merveilleux savamment orchestrée par l’auteur, qui brouille le cadre spatio-temporel du récit en usant d’une technique polyphonique où se mêlent plusieurs points de vue ou une multitude d’instances narratives ; la dernière,la symbolique de la fée, met en exergue la finalité romanesque des avatars de la fée aussi bien dans l'imaginaire aurevillien que dans la fiction littéraire au XIXe siècle.Cette étude s’efforce de suivre une perspective qui tient compte à la fois de la richesse des procédés techniques et de la profondeur thématique de l’œuvre de Barbey. / The fairy, a hybrid creature sprung from the depths of time, from greco-roman mythology and the pagan divinities of the Middle Ages, takes center stage in the artistic creation of nineteenth-century authors such as Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808-1889). Indeed, Barbey d’Aurevilly depicts unusual and powerful feminine characters, which seem, because of their enigmatic characteristics, to be related to the medieval fairy, herself a sister of the roman Parcae and greek Moirae. In L'Ensorcelée (1854), as in Un Prêtre marié (1864) and in Une Vieille Maîtresse (1851), among numerous other examples, the erotic nature of fairy-like beings combines with a prophetic and divinatory essence. This study thus addresses these two salient dimensions of the fairy in Barbey’s novels, eroticism and divination. The first section on “Depicting the fairy” establishes a typology based on the matricial figures of the fairy godmother and fairy mistress. Subsequently, the section titled « The universe of the fairy » focuses on space, or the sulfurous universe through which this enigmatic character moves. This analysis of the poetics of space attempts to elucidate Barbey’s orchestrated illusion of the supernatural and the marvelous. The writer blurs the spatio-temporal narrative frame of his novels by means of polyphony, introducing multiple points of view and narrative situations. The last section, « The symbolism of the fairy », points out the novelistic ends to which the avatars of this figure have been put, both in the aurevillian imaginary universe and more generally nineteenth-century literature. Our perspective endeavors to take into account both the wealth of aurevillian narrative technique and thematic depth of his work.

<p>This thesis presents an approach for automatically generating signing animations from a sign language notation. An avatar endowed with expressive gestures, as subtle as changes in facial expression, is used to render the sign language animations. SWML, an XML format of SignWriting is provided as input. It transcribes sign language gestures in a format compatible to virtual signing. Relevant features of sign language gestures are extracted from the SWML. These features are then converted to body animation pa- rameters, which are used to animate the avatar. Using key-frame animation techniques, intermediate key-frames approximate the expected sign language gestures. The avatar then renders the corresponding sign language gestures. These gestures are realistic and aesthetically acceptable and can be recognized and understood by Deaf people.</p>

本研究使用眼動儀器與神經科學的分析方式，探討網站設計時運用虛擬替身與個人化推薦而設計出不同的個人化購物網站，是否會影響使用者對網站親密度與產品購買意願上有不同感受。研究問題共有三個：1.網站個人化設計對網站親密度的影響程度。2.網站個人化設計對於產品購買意願的影響程度。3.使用者是否會注意到網站的個人化設計。研究結果發現個人化推薦會對網站親密度及購買意願產生正向影響，而虛擬替身則只會對親密感產生正面的影響。虛擬替身及個人化推薦都會提高消費者的對該區域的首次瀏覽時間。 / The purpose of this study is to use eye tracking analysis to investigate whether different designs of shopping websites using personalization and avatar will influence users’ website intimacy and product buying attention. First, we want to know the relationship between personalized design and website intimacy. Second, we want to know the relationship between personalized design and product buying attention. The last one is whether users pay attention to personalized designs on websites. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of personalized recommendation and avatar. The results indicate that personalization had positive impacts on users’ perceived intimacy, and users’ total gaze duration has positive effects on both website intimacy and product buying attention.

The dynamic development of new technologies influences consumers in many different ways reaching far beyond the shift in consumption patterns, challenging the way consumers live their lives. The role of new information technologies is continually growing in our daily lives changing the way we see the self and the world around us. Consequently, the advent of the computer culture incites a radical rethinking of who we are and the nature of being human, which clearly illustrates the postmodern age. As a result, over the past decades consumer research has moved away from simply viewing consumers as information processors to consumers as socially conceptualized beings. This Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) movement views consumers and consumer behaviour as articulations of meanings and materiality within the productive of complex cultural milieu. This ethnographic thesis focuses on the three-dimensional virtual world of Second Life, which is a 'Real Life' simulation and where the residents represent themselves through 'avatars', creating a kind of virtual materiality. This raises interesting questions for consumer researchers, not just about how consumption is enacted, produced and articulated within this environment, but also in relation to theoretical and methodological issues. More specifically, this thesis critically examines the development of interpretive consumer research and the emergence of the Consumer Culture Theory framework in the context of the juxtaposition of reality and hyperreality and takes a position which goes beyond the 'body in the net/physical body' binary. Therefore, this thesis places the 'avatar-as-consumer' at the centre of the research focus. The current thesis develops a theoretical framework which examines the role of consumption in resolving key paradoxes. Moreover, it extends the netnography framework from mainly text based research to the visual characteristics of virtual worlds so that it can be useful for the study of complex online environments and as a result, how the role of the researcher goes beyond netnography to virtualography is discussed.

<p>This thesis presents an approach for automatically generating signing animations from a sign language notation. An avatar endowed with expressive gestures, as subtle as changes in facial expression, is used to render the sign language animations. SWML, an XML format of SignWriting is provided as input. It transcribes sign language gestures in a format compatible to virtual signing. Relevant features of sign language gestures are extracted from the SWML. These features are then converted to body animation pa- rameters, which are used to animate the avatar. Using key-frame animation techniques, intermediate key-frames approximate the expected sign language gestures. The avatar then renders the corresponding sign language gestures. These gestures are realistic and aesthetically acceptable and can be recognized and understood by Deaf people.</p>

This paper describes the process of producing avatars for Jiddr. Today, social media surrounds the lives of youth, and communication via the Internet is an everyday occurrence for most people. Jiddr is an app that was created to give youths a platform for engaging with adults and other youths. It is a moderated forum which gives young people the opportunity to come i contact with adult role models who are knowledgable within various subject areas. On Jiddr, users are anonymous, and this is something I have placed much importance on during the design process. The relationship between critical design and interaction design has been central to this work, and I have created a concept as well as several avatars, which are presented in a prototype, based on previous studies that focus on anonymity. / Denna rapport redogör för processen att ta fram avatarer till föreningen Jiddr. Sociala medier omger ungdomar idag och kommunikation över internet hör till vardagen för de flesta. Jiddr är en samtalsapp som har skapats för att ge ungdomar en plattform där de kan prata med vuxna och andra ungdomar. Ett modererat forum som ger ungdomar möjligheten att möta vuxna förebilder som är kunniga inom olika ämnesområden. På Jiddrär användarna anonyma och detta är något jag lagt vikt vid under skapandeprocessen. Relationen mellan kritisk design och interaktionsdesign har varit central under arbetet. Och utifrån förstudier med fokus på anonymitet har jag skapat ett koncept och några avatarer som presenteras i en prototyp.

The recent leaps in virtual reality (VR) technology have unleashed revolutionary potential for applications in a wide variety of areas, including education, training, psychological-therapy, etc. As part of the effort on understanding how users interact with VR, I focused on studying full-body joint action using a road crossing task which involves perception, decision-making, action, and joint action. I have been heavily involved in the design, implementation, and construction of two large-screen, room-like stereoscopic virtual environment (VE) simulators. Using this system, I developed a three-part research plan with a series of studies to examine how people engage in full-body joint-action with a partner under three scenarios: 1. two people who are physically present in a co-occupied virtual environment; 2. one person who shares a virtual environment with a computer-generated agent (CG agent); 3. two people who share the same virtual environment remotely in physically separate places where each person is motion tracked and presented in the environment as a graphic avatar. The behaviors of participants were recorded and processed through a customized pipeline that captures important performance metrics, such as how participants pick crossable gaps and time their movements. The VE system, user study designs, and findings are introduced in this dissertation.