Virtual Humans

 

 

This section of the site is about my virtual humans work and research.

• My main thoughts (as of 2019) are captured in my Virtual Humans book (above) published by Routledge and still available (and selling) from all good booksellers. You can read more about it on the original Virtual Humans web site, but any new updates are now on the Metaverse Series website.
• Chatbots and Conversational AI: Past, Present and Future (2025) (free White Paper) is a sort of update to Virtual Humans, although loads shorter and really looking at how Large Language Models are (and are not) changing the game.
• The Thanoverse is a concept I'm currently working up in a new monograph to follow later in 2026
• I've also written a White Paper on the Military Applications of Conversational AI
• My Daden website page which offers a consulting perspective on what I do in the virtual human space
• I tend to use Medium for any long-form posts on virtual humans and the metaverse, although wargaming/PhD related ones will be posted to Substack - such as using chatbots in matrix wargames or to generate a synthetic media wrap.
• I've had many iterations of a Virtual David on different platforms, and am currently working on one using the Sensay platform, but haven't opened that up yet. However you can talk to Virtual UrbanWargamer, who should have all of the knowledge of my PhD on urban wargaming. 
• A page to support my course at IK2026 on virtual humans, the Metaverse and Digital Amortality
• Other Virtual Humans Thoughts

Virtual Human and Chatbot Articles and Papers

Here are links to some of my virtual humans writings, most of the rest are on ResearchGate:

• AI Agents for Continuous Organizational Learning - 2026 White Paper
• Chatbots and Conversational AI: Past, Present and Future - 2025 White Paper
• Military Applications of Conversational AI - 2025 White Paper

 

On Digital Amortality and Digital Immortality:

• Digital Immortality and Virtual Humans
• The Ethics and Impact of Digital Immortality
• Digital Immortality presentation for BrumAI (2019)
• From Virtual Personas to a Digital Afterlife - Guest blog post on the Aura digital afterlife site
• Birmingham TEDx - Digital Immortality presentation (2012)

 

Other older papers:

• A Model of Motivation for Virtual-Worlds Avatars
• Emotionally Responsive Robotic Avatars as Characters in Virtual Worlds
• Enhancing characters for virtual worlds and interactive environments through human-like enhancements
• Deploying Embodied AI into Virtual Worlds
• An AI Landscape - What do you mean by AI?
• Three Major Challenges for Achieving Human-Like AI
• VIOLA: Concept of a New Cognitive Framework to Enhance the Capabilities of Interactive Service Robots using Virtual Worlds

 

And Interviews:

• Talking to Virtual Barry: Inside the Digital Mind of David Burden - radio interview, 2025
• Virtual Humans – Should we be concerned? An interview with David Burden - podcast interview
• Wall Street Journal - Could AI Keep people Alive after Death
• Al Jazeera (YouTube)
• Al Mashhad (YouTube)

 

And also, of course, the infamous Guardian article on a "secret" UK MOD chatbot project that we were running! Luckily we wrote a very balanced report so there wasn't a lot the Guardian could say, and Dstl even added a positive response to the article!

 

Chatbot Projects

Here's a quick summary of some of the chatbot projects I've been involved with (I've done probably 50 overall), with links to published papers etc where available. Quite a lot were for MOD so some information is limited.

• Anonymous Intimacy - It's Almost like Talking to a Person': Student Disclosure to Pedagogical Agents in Sensitive Settings
• Covert Turing Tests - Covert Implementations of the Turing Test: A More Level Playing Field? - actually covers an MOD project and an earlier one with Loyola Marymount University
• Virtual Tutors - An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Using Pedagogical Agents for Teaching in Inclusive Ways
• Virtual Mentors and Virtual Personas - CogX Talk (video). Also picked up in the Heads Together story in the RAF Stories from the Future FICINT.
• Reflexive chatbots - based initially on DeBono's 6 Hats model, but now more generic, used on two MOD projects so far
• Virtual Synthetic wraps - creating virtual Twitter-type social media users to support virtual exercises and turn-based wargames - paper at ITEC2022 and ITEC2025.
• Newspeak Twitter Bot - converted Trump, Johnson and other Twitter posts into 1984 Orwellian Newspeak - for Wolverhampton Literary Festival
• Virtual Sheikh Bin-Bayyah - chatbot of a leading moderate Moslem cleric to help get is message a across to a younger Arabic audience (we were in Cairo a month before the Arab Spring revolution!)
• 3D virtual tour guides for the HBMeU eUniversity in Dubai, and the Virtual Library of Birmingham
• Customer support chatbot for Hanover Housing
• Virtual Libraries for Wolverhampton University, Staffordshire University, UEL
• Virtual Newsreader for Hull Telegraph

Imagery

Of course what a chatbot looks like is nothing whatsoever to do with how capable (or not) it is (just ask Sophia), but here are some images of my favourite chatbots we've worked on.

My Halo testbed bot in Second Life - reacting to a snake using an emotion model developed with Wolverhampton University

A virtual life coach implemented as a mobile chat app

 

The Bin Bayyah chatbot - doing an Arabic chatbot is non-trivial

 

A virtual librarian for UEL

 

A virtual tour guide for the HBMeu virtual campus

 

The Newspeak Twitter bot