Visualizing Meaning: Semantic Simulations and Embodiment

In this talk, I describe a semantic simulation platform that provides for embodied interactions between humans and computers or robots. This system, VoxWorld, is a multimodal dialogue system enabling communication through language, gesture, action, facial expressions, and gaze tracking, in the context of task-oriented interactions. A multimodal simulation is an embodied 3D virtual realization of both the situational environment and the co-situated agents, as well as the most salient content denoted by communicative acts in a discourse. VoxWorld enables an embodied HCI by situating both human and computational agents within the same virtual simulation environment, where they share perceptual and epistemic common ground.