Emotionally expressive head and body movement during gaze shifts

Abstract

The current state of the art virtual characters fall far short of characters produced by skilled animators. One reason for this is that the physical behaviors of virtual characters do not express the emotions and attitudes of the character adequately. A key deficiency possessed by virtual characters is that their gaze behavior is not emotionally expressive. This paper describes work on expressing emotion through head movement and body posture during gaze shifts, with intent to integrate a model of emotionally expressive eye movement into this work in the future. The paper further describes an evaluation showing that users can recognize the emotional states generated by the model. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.