Thesis

Going to University is a big change for someone and the student normally enters University feeling motivated. However, when the difficulties start to arrive and the reality that the effort required to succeed is much bigger than on the previous steps of their academic lives starts dawning on the students that just entered University they tend to lose motivation and cannot find the right methods of dealing with these loss of motivation, some of them fail courses they would on other circumstances find easy. Some universities have decided to implement a tutoring program in which the students are accompanied by a real tutor of the faculty. We intend to add to this program by delivering a tutor that is always available for the student and will help them emotionally. We brought the metaphor of two tutor characters with complimentary personalities to accompany the student throughout their semester.We studied what factors will help the student's emotional state and we arrived at rapport, empathy and relationship. We did an exploratory work on which one was more important by showing different behaviors for a virtual tutor agent in an app environment. This work was partially supported by national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) with ref. UID/CEC/50021/2013, and FCT grant from project Tutoria Virtual with ref. TDC/IVC-PEC/3963/2014

Cooperative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Human-Agent interaction is a complex but interesting subject that has not yet reached the necessary behavior to be considered satisfactory. In this document, we present how we achieved our goal of creating an artificial players capable of effectively solving Geometry Friends levels, using a promising previous approach, that uses the Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees (RRT). Starting on this solution, we developed our agents by adding new strategies to the algorithm, replanning, and a new controller. When our agents proved capable of solving single-player levels a step was taken towards an initial approach for cooperation with human players. Our final solution is a pair of agents that can not only solve most of the presented challenges of single-player levels, with some current limitations, but also play with human players in simple cooperation levels. After a user testing session, the most human players affirmed the experience was positive and that our agents presented capabilities of cooperation and adaptation.

Studies have shown that wearing different clothes have different effects on human psychological processes, an effect referred to as enclothed cognition. This work aims at verifying whether this influence is also present in a virtual space where a person is represented by an avatar he/she controls. Using Unreal Engine 4 and Nvidia's APEX clothing, we created three distinct virtual scenarios. In the first one, the player's character is dressed in casual clothes. In the other two, they dress in a lab coat. However, one is implied as belonging to a doctor and the other to a painter. In all scenarios users performed problem solving tasks. 51 participants were distributed and played through the different scenarios and the results suggest that the effects of enclothed cognition are not always observed in virtual environments.

Children suffering from autism face many challenges. The logistics required to treat their disorders is costly and it can be difficult for families to access them. Whereas games and virtual reality systems have been widely used in therapy to propose affordable and effective treatments for different type of disorders, only few of them addressed the particularities of autistic disorders. In this work, we propose the design for a virtual reality game that aims to provide a relaxation experience for children with autism. After reviewing the current state of the art and understanding the challenges underlying the conception of such a system, we detail a conceptual architecture, highlighting the key components supporting autism therapy while promoting an engaging experience, how it was implemented and our plan for evaluating it.