Virtual Humans as Centaurs: Melding Real and Virtual

摘要

Centaurs are man-machine teams that can work together on problems and can out-perform, either people or computers working alone in domains as varied as chess-playing and protein folding. But the centaur of Greek mythology was not a team, but rather a hybrid of man and horse with some of the characteristics of each. In this paper, we outline our efforts to build virtual humans, which might be considered hybrid centaurs, combining features of both people and machines. We discuss experimental evidence that shows that these virtual human hybrids can outperform both people and inanimate processes in some tasks such as medical interviewing.