Towards natural gesture synthesis: Evaluating gesture units in a data-driven approach to gesture synthesis

Abstract

Virtual humans still lack naturalness in their nonverbal behaviour. We present a data-driven solution that moves towards a more natural synthesis of hand and arm gestures by recreating gestural behaviour in the style of a human performer. Our algorithm exploits the concept of gesture units to make the produced gestures a continuous now of movement. We empirically validated the use of gesture units in the generation and show that it causes the virtual human to be perceived as more natural. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.