Category: 5.2 Thesis

Title:

Attractiveness and Confidence in Walking Style of Male and Female Virtual Characters

Thaler, A. et al. (2020) Attractiveness and Confidence in Walking Style of Male and Female Virtual Characters.

Animated virtual characters are essential for many applications. The authors examined the relationship between gender differences in walking style and the attractiveness and confidence of male and female avatars.

Use the MoSh algorithm to generate realistic virtual characters for interactive VR games, tutoring games, training, and general interfaces. They also looked at confidence and attractiveness.

Human movement contains a wealth of socially relevant information, such as a person’s identity, health, and biological sex. The exaggerated masculine walking style is defined by a wide stride, pronounced shoulder swing, and elbows held away from the body.

They used the walking movements of 50 men and 50 women from a motion capture database to create 100 virtual walkers.

Correlations were calculated between the coefficients of each linear discriminant function and participants’ ratings of attractiveness and confidence.

-Analysis showed a strong correlation between the ratings of animated characters and sketches and the ratings of animated and static characters.

Sexual dimorphism in walking patterns governs the female attractiveness of animated characters and sketches and the male confidence of animated characters and graphics. Research has also found that increasing vertical movement of the body is crucial to women’s confidence.

They investigated the relationship between perceived attractiveness and confidence and avatars’ body shape and walking movements. They found that sexual dimorphism in walking style had a more significant impact on female beauty than male attractiveness.

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Title:

Investigating how speech and animation realism influencethe perceived personality of virtual characters and agents

Thomas, S. et al. (2022) Investigating how speech and animation realism influence the perceived personality of virtual characters and agents

Use performance capture data to explore how features of speech and animation drive the depiction of personality. The processing of speech and movement had mixed effects on these traits, with the direction being dominant in describing extraversion and speech being dominant in communicating pleasantness and emotional stability.

Virtual characters and agents digitally represent humans in various environments, including computer games and movies, mentors, streamers, doctors, and 3D virtual assistants. Understanding how verbal and non-verbal characteristics influence the perceived personality of virtual agents is essential for extended reality (XR) innovators.

Nonverbal communication is a very effective way of expressing personality; impressions of some traits can be formed with minimal short-term information, while others require extended periods or repeated exposure. Explore how language and movement patterns influence personality portrayal using a full-body motion capture dataset and simultaneous unscripted dialogue recordings. Higher action fidelity conveyed extraversion, whereas lower commitment conveyed conscientiousness.

Research shows that personality judgments influence people’s trust, behavior, and interactions with virtual characters and agents. Non-verbal features such as body shape, attractiveness, and posture contribute to our interpretation of personality, as do verbal elements such as voice patterns and rhythm. The content and wording of a speech may influence the perceived degree of extraversion. In contrast, personality in the address has less to do with authenticity and more with the speaker’s uniqueness.

The first impression of a seat is formed within the first 12.5 seconds of interaction. People recognize emotions quickly and efficiently through sounds and perceive personalities consistently through brief one-word utterances.

Pennebaker and King believe that language style impacts personality, and appearance is another crucial factor. Understanding the language styles used to generate non-verbal behavioral text can lead to better implementation of personality-driven animations.

The effects of motor and verbal realism on personality were compared and studied, and it was found that vocal information dominated impression formation in all cases, which may be related to politicians speaking more severely and thoughtfully rather than natural and interpersonal relations.

Title:

Culture and 3D animation A study of how culture and body language affects the perception of animated 3D characters

Dahle, T. (2019) Culture and 3D animation: A study of how culture and body language affects the perception of animated 3D characters

This section discusses culture and body language, including how to express emotions, how culture affects body language, and how to read body language. This section also covers gender, facial expressions, and animation/games.
Culture affects many aspects of people’s lives, including how they think and react to the world around them and how their body language is used and perceived.

Humans use body language to communicate thoughts and emotions with others in social situations.

People from different cultural backgrounds express emotions differently, with people from East Asian countries being more introverted. Universal facial expressions include happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, and anger, while body language conveys these emotions through head position, hand gestures, feet, and posture.

Body language is an important part of communication, accounting for 65% of message interpretation. Context, grouping, consistency, coherence, culture, and instinctive/learned gestures all impact how body language is used. When interpreting body language, it is important to be aware of cultural differences to ensure successful communication.

Culture affects how people perceive the body language of animated characters, and developers should be aware of cultural differences when creating characters. Body language can be exaggerated or manipulated to achieve a desired effect.

Disney’s 12 Principles of Animation are 2D/3D animation guidelines created by Walt Disney. These principles include Anticipation, Squeeze and Stretch, Follow-Up and Overlapping Actions, Periodization, Slow-In/Slow-Out, Arcs, Assistive Actions, Timing, Exaggeration, Solid Drawing, Attraction, and Pose vs. Pose/Straight Progression.

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Title:

Emotion Capture: Emotionally Expressive Characters for Games

Ennis, C. et al. (2013) Emotion Capture: Emotionally Expressive Characters for Games. Association for Computing Machinery New York, NY

People can identify emotions through body or facial movements alone, but it’s best to combine facial and body movements to create a more expressive character.

Avatars are used in many applications, from entertainment to education, and must be expressive and emotional. Real-time facial motion capture systems can interact with virtual characters to display facial and body emotions.

Our goal is to study how virtual characters express body and facial expressions when expressing emotions through language. We’ll learn whether there are differences in how men and women portray emotions and whether screen size affects how we perceive emotions.

Research shows that humans have a strong ability to recognize the behavior of others and infer higher-level context from point source data alone. Research also shows that humans are susceptible to the emotions conveyed by others.

Avatars can provide further insight into perceptions of mood and personality. They can combine verbal expression, gesture frequency, and gesture display to enhance extroverted sensing.

They used fully captured facial and body movements to study how emotions are perceived through natural, unobtrusive activities. They anticipated that female and male characters might convey different messages through body and facial movements. They used motion capture to animate the virtual characters using a Vicon optical system with 21 cameras and avoided typical motion capture artifacts by optimizing the tag set and grabbing the number and correct position of the cameras. They recruited four trained female and four male actors and asked them to perform a series of phrases describing four basic emotions: anger, fear, happiness, and sadness. No actors’ voices were used in the experiment.

To avoid ambiguity in movement and form, two avatars, a male actor and a female actor, were used. Use a bone-based approach to drive body and facial geometry. They showed participants video clips of eight actors expressing four emotions in three blocks. At the end of each segment, participants answer two questions.

They recruited 14 participants via a university email list, and they completed the experiment within 30 minutes. They received book tokens as compensation for their time.

They found that anger and sadness were most easily recognized by the whole limb, then by the stem alone, and finally by the face alone, while fear was equally effective by the entire stalk and by the limb alone.

I chose a title related to body language for my thesis, so I’ll look for more papers in that direction over the next few weeks to support it and clarify the subject more.

Here are my research notes:

Title:

Discerning Emotion Through Movement: A study of body language in portraying emotion in animation

Larsson, P. (2014) Discerning emotion through movement: A study of body language in portraying emotion in animation

• According to researchers, up to 93% of human communication comprises body language. Facial expressions take up a big part of this, but subtle changes in posture, the placement of the head and shoulders, and what someone’s hands are doing are also important.

• The basic knowledge of animation is a starting point for animators everywhere. However, the endless supply of documented realistic movement might confuse the animators to overlook body language as a tool, so their animations lack character.

• This paper will test the expressive non-verbal language of a faceless animated character and show fresh new animators how much can be said with very little.

• The placement of the shoulders is vital to the posture, and tension in the body indicates negative feelings. Low tension means relaxed shoulders and very low tension means no tension.

Head

• The head’s orientation can indicate many things, including interest, lack of interest, and a sign of distancing. A slightly bowed head might indicate submissiveness, while a strong bow forward might indicate pain or sorrow.

Hand placement

• The placement of hands indicates quite clearly how a person feels. They can be relaxed hanging down the sides, or if sitting down, placed in the lap, or a more controlled and deliberate tension which balls the hands into fists.

Arms

Arms, posture, and feet can indicate a person’s feelings, such as confidence, purpose or worry.

Posture

• A positive body posture is straight-backed with the shoulders in a neutral or pushed-back state, whereas a negative body posture is either tensed or slumped. There are many ways of displaying either, including slumped, closed, sorrowful, or aggressive body postures.

Open or Closed

Open body language indicates openness, confidence, and a willingness to talk. Closed body language indicates negativity, defensiveness, and a desire to not be disturbed.

This article also mentions that using the four emotions of anger, happiness, rage, and sadness to study the differences in body language gives more intuitive results.

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Title:

3D Character Animation Using Sign Language

Alves, A.C. (2017) 3D character animation using sign language

• Communication has been important since the dawn of humanity, and language is an evolved form of communication with a set of rules for transmitting information in a structured and traditional way. However, communication is only effective when all participants speak the same language.

• Communication barriers can negatively affect many aspects of the lives of affected individuals. For example, in Portugal, two other native languages are spoken: Milanese and Portuguese Sign Language (LGP)

• Hearing loss limits an individual’s ability to communicate through spoken language and can lead to loneliness, isolation, and frustration.

• Professional associations provide sign language education and interpreters for news, events, conferences, and meetings to empower hard-of-hearing individuals to always be able to communicate with society.
  This thesis addresses the communication limitations that today’s deaf individuals suffer by using natural language processing techniques to decompose Portuguese sentences into equivalent symbols in Portuguese sign language. A system called 3DSL was developed to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.

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Title:

“Panawa” animation movement designs Rat character with a human personality

Aulia, E. and Aditya, C. (2017) “Panawa” Animation Movement Design: Rat character with human …, “Panawa” animation movement design: Rat character with human personality

• In animation, emotions can be expressed through movements that convey information about objects. Body language and facial expressions can also be used to reinforce feelings.

• When designing the movements of a rat, it is necessary to have an in-depth understanding of the character, which requires an understanding of the character’s background, physical condition, nature and habits, situations experienced, psychology and sociology, etc.

• To design the actions of a mouse character with human characteristics, it is necessary to combine the features of the mouse with human body language.