DIGIREAL Lunch Meeting - Emotional Interactions with Virtual Humans - 06 | 02 | 2025

The first two DIGIREAL lunch meetings of 2025 celebrate the start of project VHESPER which examines the emerging role of virtual humans (VHs) - highly interactive, realistic digital agents - across various applications, including healthcare, education, and entertainment. The project aims to strengthen European research networks by exploring VHs’ societal impacts, conducting experiments on empathic interactions between real and virtual humans, and laying the groundwork for EU-funded research and development (R&D) proposals.
​
​Speakers:

• Dr. Dennis Küster (Senior researcher in the high-profile area "Minds, Media, Machines" at the University of Bremen) on EMG-based facial action unit recognition and animation.
• Prof. Dr. Ursula Hess (Professor of Psychology at Humboldt-University of Berlin) on the use of virtual humans for the study of the influence of situational context on emotion communication.