“In this research, we are exploring what role real peers, virtual peers, real professors and virtual professors play in learning about patient communication.”As part of its work, the team is developing an emotive virtual reality patient, which will allow medical students to improve their patient communication skills. Zielke said the virtual patients also can exhibit symptoms to help medical students improve their nonverbal communication skills. As part of its work, the research team is developing a natural-language interface capable of responsive and realistic communication. Transmitting our virtual humans over advanced networks is a key part of those efforts. “We don’t want the virtual humans to be linear, where there is just a choice of canned responses.