The impact of realistic virtual humans within immersive environments

The purpose of this project is to illustrate the impact of realistic virtual humans
within virtual environments, focused in games and serious games. In this thesis we investigated the field of virtual humans in games, serious games and related
applications. We provided an overview of the relevant existing literature on the
uncanny valley effect as well as trying to identify the importance of virtual-human characters within historical applications. Also we investigated how virtual humans are implemented in virtual environments, how they affect the game play and the user. The paper starts with a short introduction of the project TimeMachine, a single player serious game with a first person perspective for cultural promotion. Thereafter we introduce the topic of virtual humans and give a brief overview of current artefacts related to the topic. Through this experiment we answer if realistic virtual humans have a negative or a positive impact to the user.