The Nonverbal Toolkit: Towards a Framework for Automatic Integration of Nonverbal Communication into Virtual Environments

To fully utilize the social potential of virtual environments, support for seamless and automatic integration of nonverbal communication is essential. In this paper we propose a conceptual and architectural design for a framework, which provides an integrated, flexible environment for the cooperation of heterogeneous modules specialized in different aspects of the acquirement, analysis and presentation of nonverbal communication cues. We propose a semantic framework for the knowledge exchange between these modules, as well as a general purpose architecture for the semantically correct fusion of nonverbal features.