ABSTRACT
Animated characters appear in applications for entertainment, education, and therapy. When these characters display appropriate emotions for their context, they can be particularly effective. Characters can display emotions by accurately mimicking the facial expressions and vocal cues that people display or by damping or exaggerating the emotionality of the expressions. In this work, we explored which of these strategies would be most effective for animated characters. We investigated the effects of altering the auditory and facial levels of expressiveness on emotion recognition accuracy and ratings of perceived emotional intensity and naturalness. We ran an experiment with emotion (angry, happy, sad), auditory emotion level (low, high), and facial motion magnitude (damped, unaltered, exaggerated) as within-subjects factors. Participants evaluated animations of a character whose facial motion matched that of an actress we tracked using an active appearance model. This method of tracking and animation can capture subtle facial motions in real-time, a necessity for many interactive animated characters. We manipulated auditory emotion level by asking the actress to speak sentences at varying levels, and we manipulated facial motion magnitude by exaggerating and damping the actress's spatial motion. We found that the magnitude of auditory expressiveness was positively related to emotion recognition accuracy and ratings of emotional intensity. The magnitude of facial motion was positively related to ratings of emotional intensity but negatively related to ratings of naturalness.
- Ambadar, Z., Schooler, J. W., and Cohen, J. F. 2005. Deciphering the enigmatic face: The importance of facial dynamics in interpreting subtle facial expressions. Psychological Science 16, 5, 403--410.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Bartneck, C., and Reichenbach, J. 2005. Subtle emotional expressions of synthetic characters. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 62, 2, 179--192. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bassili, J. N. 1978. Facial motion in the perception of faces and of emotional expression. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 4, 3, 373--379.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Bassili, J. N. 1979. Emotion recognition: The role of facial movement and the relative importance of upper and lower areas of the face. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, 11, 2049--2058.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Beale, R., and Creed, C. 2009. Affective interaction: How emotional agents affect users. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 67, 9, 755--776. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Boker, S. M., Cohn, J. F., Theobald, B.-J., Matthews, I., Brick, T. R., and Spies, J. R. 2009. Effects of damping head movement and facial expression in dyadic conversation using real-time facial expression tracking and synthesized avatars. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364, 1535, 3485--3495.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Bradley, M. M., Greenwald, M. K., Petry, M. C., and Lang, P. J. 1992. Remembering pictures: Pleasure and arousal in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 18, 2, 379--390.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Calder, A. J., Young, A. W., Rowland, D., and Perrett, D. I. 1997. Computer-enhanced emotion in facial expressions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 264, 919--925.Google Scholar
- Calder, A. J., Rowland, D., Young, A. W., Nimmo-Smith, I., Keane, J., and Perrett, D. I. 2000. Caricaturing facial expressions. Cognition 76, 2, 105--146.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Cootes, T. F., Edwards, G. J., and Taylor, C. J. 2001. Active appearance models. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 23, 6, 681--685. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cootes, T. F., Wheeler, G., Walker, K., and Taylor, C. J. 2002. View-based active appearance models. Image and Vision Computing 20, 9--10, 657--664.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Cunningham, D. W., and Wallraven, C. 2009. Dynamic information for the recognition of conversational expressions. Journal of Vision 9, 13, 1--17.Google ScholarCross Ref
- de Gelder, B., and Vroomen, J. 2000. The perception of emotions by ear and by eye. Cognition and Emotion 14, 3, 289--311.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ekman, P., and Friesen, W. V. 1978. Facial Action Coding System: Investigator's Guide. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, CA.Google Scholar
- Hess, U., Blairy, S., and Kleck, R. E. 1997. The intensity of emotional facial expressions and decoding accuracy. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 21, 4, 241--257.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Hill, H. C., Troje, N. F., and Johnston, A. 2005. Rangeand domain-specific exaggeration of facial speech. Journal of Vision 5, 10, 793--807.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Hodgkinson, G. 2009. The seduction of realism. In Proc. of ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2009 Educators Program, 1--4. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hyde, J., Carter, E. J., Kiesler, S., and Hodgins, J. K. 2013. Perceptual effects of damped and exaggerated facial motion in animated characters. In Proc. of IEEE Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition 2013, 1--6.Google Scholar
- Kleiner, M., Brainard, D., and Pelli, D. 2007. What's new in Psychtoolbox-3? In Perception, vol. 36, ECVP Abstract Supplement.Google Scholar
- Lasseter, J. 1987. Principles of traditional animation applied to 3D computer animation. In Proc. of ACM SIGGRAPH 1987, 35--44. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Massaro, D. W., and Egan, P. B. 1996. Perceiving affect from the voice and the face. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 3, 2, 215--221.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Matthews, I., and Baker, S. 2004. Active appearance models revisited. International Journal of Computer Vision 60, 135--164. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nass, C., and Moon, Y. 2000. Machines and mindlessness: Social responses to computers. Journal of Social Issues 56, 1, 81--103.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Pollick, F. E., Hill, H., Calder, A., and Paterson, H. 2003. Recognising facial expression from spatially and temporally modified movements. Perception 32, 813--826.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Russell, J. A. 1980. A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39, 6, 1161--1178.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Theobald, B.-J., Matthews, I., Mangini, M., Spies, J. R., Brick, T. R., Cohn, J. F., and Boker, S. M. 2009. Mapping and manipulating facial expression. Language and Speech 52, 369--386.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Thomas, F., and Johnston, O. 1981. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. Abbeville Press.Google Scholar
- Tinwell, A., Grimshaw, M., Nabi, D. A., and Williams, A. 2011. Facial expression of emotion and perceptions of the Uncanny Valley in virtual characters. Computers in Human Behavior, 2, 741--749. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wallbott, H. G., and Scherer, K. R. 1986. Cues and channels in emotion recognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51, 4, 690--699.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Watson, D., and Tellegan, A. 1985. Toward a consensual structure of mood. Psychological Bulletin 98, 219--235.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Assessing naturalness and emotional intensity: a perceptual study of animated facial motion
Recommendations
Psychological responses to simulated displays of mismatched emotional expressions
Embodied agents are often designed with the ability to simulate human emotion. This paper investigates the psychological impact of simulated emotional expressions on computer users with a particular emphasis on how mismatched facial and audio ...
Artist friendly facial animation retargeting
This paper presents a novel facial animation retargeting system that is carefully designed to support the animator's workflow. Observation and analysis of the animators' often preferred process of key-frame animation with blendshape models informed our ...
Artist friendly facial animation retargeting
SA '11: Proceedings of the 2011 SIGGRAPH Asia ConferenceThis paper presents a novel facial animation retargeting system that is carefully designed to support the animator's workflow. Observation and analysis of the animators' often preferred process of key-frame animation with blendshape models informed our ...
Comments