Perceptual evaluation of human animation timewarping

Abstract

Understanding the perception of humanoid character motion can provide insights that will enable realism, accuracy, computational cost and data storage space to be optimally balanced. In this sketch we describe a preliminary perceptual evaluation of human motion timewarping, a common editing method for motion capture data. During the experiment, participants were shown pairs of walking motion clips, both timewarped and at their original speed, and asked to identify the real animation. We found a statistically significant difference between speeding up and slowing down, which shows that displaying clips at higher speeds produces obvious artifacts, whereas even significant reductions in speed were perceptually acceptable.