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Humans may soon be able to develop long-term relationships with virtual humans that are capable of reading and adapting to our emotions, say French researchers.

Professor Catherine Pelachaud, director of research from the Paris Institute of Technology presented her research this week at a meeting of the ARC Network in Human Communication Science in Sydney.

Pelachaud and colleagues are developing virtual humans, called Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), that can act autonomously in a virtual environment.

As well as speaking, the agents communicate with facial expressions, head movements, hand gestures and gaze.

People have high expectations of virtual humans, says Pelachaud, and often lose interest quickly in them because they don't appear to be very 'human'.

In related research, the researchers are developing an agent that they say can empathise with real humans.

a virtual agent on a screen can be taught to detect, via webcam, the emotion of a person looking at the screen.