Cybersecurity competitions are exciting for the game participants; however, the excitement and educational value do not necessarily transfer to audiences because audiences may not be experts in the field. To improve the audiences’ comprehension and engagement levels at these events, we have proposed a virtual commentator architecture for cybersecurity competitions. Based on the architecture, we have developed a virtual animated agent that serves as a commentator in cybersecurity competition. This virtual commentator can interact with audiences with facial expressions and the corresponding hand gestures. The commentator can provide several types of feedback including causal, congratulatory, deleterious, assistive, background, and motivational responses. In addition, when producing speech, the lips, tongue, and jaw provide visual cues that complement auditory cues. The virtual commentator is flexible enough to be employed in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competitions environment. Our preliminary results demonstrate the architecture can generate phonemes with timestamps and behavioral tags. These timestamps and tags provide solid building blocks for implementing desired responsive behaviors.
Auditory cognition and perception of action video game players
A training method to improve speech hearing in noise has proven elusive, with most methods failing to transfer to untrained tasks. One common approach to identify potentially viable training paradigms is to make use of cross-sectional designs. For instance, the consistent finding that people who chose to avidly engage with action video games as part of their normal life also show enhanced performance on non-game visual tasks has been used as a foundation to test the causal impact of such game play via true experiments (e.g., in more translational designs). However, little work has examined the association between action video game play and untrained auditory tasks, which would speak to the possible utility of using such games to improve speech hearing in noise. To examine this possibility, 80 participants with mixed action video game experience were tested on a visual reaction time task that has reliably shown superior performance in action video game players (AVGPs) compared to non-players (≤ 5 h/week across game categories) and multi-genre video game players (> 5 h/week across game categories). Auditory cognition and perception were tested using auditory reaction time and two speech-in-noise tasks. Performance of AVGPs on the visual task replicated previous positive findings. However, no significant more »
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10189374
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2045-2322
- Publisher:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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