Tool to detect if someone is lying online

Monday, 12 April 2010, 22:18 IST   |    3 Comments
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Tool to detect if someone is lying online
London: It may soon be possible to detect if someone is lying online with the help of avatars that can mimic our real-world eye movements. In a research on virtual worlds, which are populated by avatars with static or pre-programmed gazes, scientists at the University College London found that when they mirrored some person's eye movement on their avatars it was very easy to spot when they were lying. "One way to make interactions feel more realistic is to reproduce a person's eye movement on their avatar. It will also make it easier to spot whether an avatar is telling the truth," Lead Author William Steptoe was quoted as saying by New Scientist. The technology could help in business meetings held in virtual environments, or to enhance communication between people with social phobias, where face-to-face interaction can seem daunting, Steptoe said. Virtual world is a genre of online community that often takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment, through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. The term today has become synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of avatars visible to others graphically but these avatars have static or pre-programmed gazes.