Displaying facial motions such as crying or laughing is difficult to achieve in real-time simulations and games. Not only because of the complicated simulation of the physical characteristics such as muscle motions or fluid simulations, but also because one needs to know how to control these motions on a higher level. In this paper, we propose a method that uses the MPEG-4 Facial Animation standard to control a realistic crying face in real-time. The tear... Read more

Facial animation has reached a high level of photorealism. Skin is rendered with grain and translucency, wrinkles are accurate and dynamic. These recent visual improvements are not fully tested for their contribution to the perceived expressiveness of virtual characters. This paper presents a perceptual study assessing the impact of different rendering modes of expressive wrinkles on users' perception of facial expressions of basic and complex emotions. Our results suggest that realistic wrinkles increase agent's expressivity... Read more

Wrinkles, blushing, sweating and tears are physiological manifestations of emotions in humans. Therefore, the simulation of these phenomena is important for the goal of building believable virtual humans which interact naturally and effectively with humans. This paper describes a real-time model for the simulation of wrinkles, blushing, sweating and tears. A study is also conducted to assess the influence of the model on the perception of surprise, sadness, anger, shame, pride and fear. The study... Read more

Recent studies have shown that virtual humans can facilitate social interactions among people who have difficulty in forming social bonds or help develop their social skills by interaction with virtual practice. Virtual human research tends to focus exclusively on appearance or behavior in assessing agent effectiveness, whereas other studies of human social interaction emphasize aspects of the social context, such as anticipated future interaction (AFI) which has been implicated as a key moderator of people's... Read more

For simulating communicative behavior, realistic appearance and plausible behavior is important. Postures and mimics also reflect emotional behavior. There exist various models of emotion, like the psycho-evolutionary theory developed by Plutchik [1], or Ekman's FACS. But most models are only suited for muscular expressions. A more unattended field however, also in graphics, is the change in color. Also, other physiological symptoms like crying are left unconsidered. Read more

In the paper "Animated Conversation: Rule-Based Generation of Facial Expression, Gesture and Spoken Intonation for Multiple Conversational Agents", we describe an implemented system which automatically generates and animates conversations between multiple human-like agents with appropriate and synchronized speech, intonation, facial expressions, and hand gestures. Conversations are created by a dialogue planner that produces the text as well as the intonation of the utterances. The speaker/listener relationship, the text, and the intonation in turn drive facial... Read more