A Virtual Companion Empty-Nest Elderly Dining System Based on Virtual Avatars

With the further acceleration of my country's urbanization and aging, the number of empty-nest elderly people gradually accounts for a larger proportion of my country's social structure. The pension issue has also become a social issue of urgent concern. Many young people work busy to support their families in other cities, and cannot go home frequently to visit their elderly parents. It is even rarer to eat together. Based on virtual human technology, this paper introduces a remote virtual companion system based on depth camera Kinect, which aims to solve the problem that children cannot accompany empty-nest elderly to dine. This system supports multi-person collaborative interaction in different places, and supports two companion modes. One mode is that when relatives have time to accompany the elderly to eat, this system drives the virtual avatars through the character mapping algorithm and tracking the bone movements of the real person. The other mode is when the relatives do not have time to accompany the elderly to eat, this system uses intelligent virtual agent to accompany the elderly to eat. The interaction method of this system has three ways of multi-modal interaction, including visual interaction, gesture interaction, and voice interaction.