Building a hybrid virtual agent for testing user empathy and arousal in response to avatar (micro-)expressions
PubDate: November 2017
Teams: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Writers: Dooley Murphy
Abstract
This poster paper describes a hybrid (i.e., film and CG) method for capturing and implementing facial expressions for/in VR. A video camera was used to capture an actor’s performance. The actor’s eyes and mouth were isolated, and footage was processed as movie textures to overlay a static 3D model of a head. Micro-expressions (subtle, rapid movements of muscles in and around the eyes and mouth in particular) are thus captured in a fine-grained, yet low- cost and low-tech alternative to established techniques. A future experiment will compare the emotive efficacy of the hybrid virtual agent with that of a conventional (fully CG) rigged avatar head in a 6DoF scenario that transitions from sympathetic (gauging empathy by self-report) to confrontational (gauging physiological arousal by heart-rate or GSR). The experiment’s prospective design is discussed, as well as its significance for the study of the crucial intersection of social plausibility and perceptual realism in VR.
