A perceptual study of the relationship between posture and gesture for virtual characters

Abstract

Adding expressive body motions that synchronizes with gestures appropriately is a key element in creating a lively, intelligent virtual character. However, little is known about the relationship between body motions and gestures or how sensitive humans are to the errors generated by desynchronized gesture and body motion. In this paper, we investigated the motion splicing technique used for aligning body motion and studied people's sensitivity to desynchronized body motions through two experiments. The first experiment is designed to see whether audio will affect people's sensitivity to desynchronization errors and explore the role of Posture-Gesture Mergers in the transferability of body motion. A motion distance metric for measuring the distance between stylistically varied body motions is proposed and evaluated in a second experiment. The experiments revealed that audio does not affect the recognition rate, but the presence of posture gesture mergers in the source motion lowers output quality, and people's sensitivity to motion realism is related to an energy distance metric. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.