Project description
Embodied online dancing and partying with digital characters
With internet experience nowadays mostly being passive, disconnected and disembodied, many individuals are isolated instead of brought together. The EU-funded CAROUSEL project aims to overcome the isolation of online users by allowing them to dance and party together even if they are physically separated. Through imaginative combinations of artificial intelligence and immersive interaction technologies, including the creation of life-like digital characters, CAROUSEL will enable internet users to feel each other’s presence, touch, and movement, from dancing together. These developments will help overcome isolation and loneliness and bring improvements to human health, work, and wellbeing. Moreover, they will generate the foundations for as yet unimagined forms of online communication and expression.
Objective
The uniqueness of the CAROUSEL+ value proposition resides in its capacity to empower meaningful visceral group social interaction to tangibly share imagination and physical movement in virtual and hybrid reality settings beyond the existing digital communication technology such as massive online game environments, peer-to-peer connections and social media networks. CAROUSEL+ technology will allow people, in small or larger groups, to feel good and have fun together. CAROUSEL+ will pave the way for the emergence of social- physical behaviour of digital characters by better understanding human body-language and being capable to interact autonomously with a group of people. The project will lay the new technical, and scientific, foundation for social and physical real-world AI by inventing, examining, simulating, developing, testing and validating human-digital interaction scenarios. The dream of the project is to create a sustainable innovation ecosystem of young talents around a new research path to design AI enabled digital characters which understand the social body language and can interact in a social and physical way with humans. CAROUSEL+ wants to lay the technical foundation for “social enabled” digital characters. The innovation perspective of this new branch “Real-World Social and Physical AI” is tremendous as it can be applied to many applications in many areas, for physically interacting in a meaningful social way. In particular digital characters in the future could act as physical trainers, dancers, entertainers, actors, co-workers, health assistants, guides, educators, spectators, physical therapists and companions. Beyond social, entertainment, health and educational applications, CAROUSEL+ learning and understanding of body language and group dynamics could be deployed in many other areas, including security, peace-making, emergency handling and autonomous driving.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
67663 Kaiserslautern
Germany