Using individual light rigs to control the perception of a virtual character's personality

Abstract

We investigate how lighting can be used to influence how the personality of virtual characters is perceived. We propose a character-centric lighting system composed of three dynamic lights that can be configured using an interactive editor. To study the effect of character-centric lighting on observers, we created four lighting configurations derived from the photography and film literature. A user study with 32 subjects shows that the lighting setups do influence the perception of the characters' personality. We found lighting effects with regard to the perception of dominance. Moreover, we found that the personality perception of female characters seems to change more easily than for male characters. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.