This paper reports a preliminary result of a cross-cultural study on the facial regions as cues to recognize virtual agents' facial expressions. We believe providing research results on the perception of cartoonish virtual agents' facial expressions to HRI research community is meaningful in order to minimize the effort to develop robot's facial expressions. The result implies Japanese weighed facial cues more heavily in the eye regions than Hungarians, who weighed facial cues more heavily in the mouth region than Japanese.

This paper introduces a preliminary result of a cross-cultural study on the facial regions as cues to recognize virtual agents' facial expressions. We believe providing research results on the perception of cartoonish virtual agents' facial expressions to HRI research community is meaningful in order to minimize the effort to develop robot's facial expressions. The result implies 1) the mouth region is more effective in conveying the emotions of the facial expressions than the eye region, 2) there are cultural differences in using facial regions as cues to recognize cartoonish facial expressions between Hungary and Japan.

Abstract Virtual humans are employed in many interactive applications using 3D virtual environments, including (serious) games. The motion of such virtual humans should look realistic (or ‘natural’) and allow interaction with the surroundings and other (virtual) humans. Current animation techniques differ in the trade‐off they offer between motion naturalness and the control that can be exerted over the motion. We show mechanisms to parametrize, combine (on different body parts) and concatenate motions generated by different animation techniques. We discuss several aspects of motion naturalness and show how it can be evaluated. We conclude by showing the promise of combinations of different animation paradigms to enhance both naturalness and control.

In this paper we raise the issue whether imperfections, characteristic of human-human communication, should be taken into account when developing virtual humans. We argue that endowing virtual humans with the imperfections of humans can help making them more 'comfortable' to interact with. That is, the natural communication of a virtual human should not be restricted to multimodal utterances that are always perfect, both in the sense of form and of content. We illustrate our views with examples from two own applications that we have worked on: the Virtual Dancer, and the Virtual Trainer. In both applications imperfectness helps in keeping the interaction engaging and entertaining.

Abstract In the paper we present two novel interactive tools, Emotion Disc and Emotion Squares, to explore the facial expression space. They map navigation in a two‐dimensional circle, by the first tool, or in two two‐dimensional squares, by the second tool, to the high‐dimensional parameter space of facial expressions, by using a small number of predefined reference expressions. They can be used as exploration tools by researchers, or as control devices by end‐users to put expressions on the face of embodied agents or avatars in applications like games, telepresence and education.

This paper reports on two experiments with a Talking Head that explore the ability of eyebrow movements to cue focus. The first experiment tests how listeners react to synthetic stimuli in which the eyebrow movements coincide with pitch accents versus those in which these two occur on different words. Results show that subjects prefer those utterances in which pitch and eyebrow movements are aligned on the same word. The second experiment investigates whether listeners are sensitive to eyebrow movements when they have to rate the prominence of particular words in audiovisual stimuli. This experiment shows that eyebrow movements both boost the perceived prominence of words that also receive a pitch accent, and downscale the prominence of unaccented words in the immediate context of the accented word. 1.