Abstract
Virtual Reality experiences featuring realistic Virtual Humans with convincing facial expressions are a useful tool to improve social skill in humans. For this reason several investigations have been carried out on the recognition of virtual avatar emotions, based on dynamic and static facial cues originated by basic emotions developed by Ekman. Dynamism and realism of facial expressions are both important aspects of the process of face-to-face interaction in everyday life. In this paper we present the results of a research aiming at investigating the impact of the combination of dynamic facial expressions corresponding to particular emotions with a high level of realism of virtual faces. A study where we have measured the level of intensity in the correspondence between facial expressions of virtual avatars and emotional stimuli perceived by an observer was carried out on two groups of participants with different expertise in Virtual Reality. Results show a high level of intensity in this correspondence in both groups through the evaluation of two variables: time response and the score assigned to each emotion. We suggest that the use of dynamic virtual avatars offers advantages for studying emotion recognition in a face in that they recreate a realistic stimuli in emotion research.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V.: Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 17(2), 124 (1971)
Mead, M.: Visual anthropology in a discipline of words. Principles of Vis. Anthropol. 3, 3–12 (1975)
Ekman, P.: Are there basic emotions? Psychol. Rev. 99, 550–553 (1992)
Adolphs, R.: Recognizing emotion from facial expressions: psychological and neurological mechanisms. Behav. Cogn. Neurosci. Rev. 1(1), 21–62 (2002)
Leppänen, J.M., Hietanen, J.K.: Positive facial expressions are recognized faster than negative facial expressions, but why? Psychol. Res. 69(1–2), 22–29 (2004)
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V.: Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Movement. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto (1978)
Knight, B., Johnston, A.: The role of movement in face recognition. Vis. Cogn. 4(3), 265–273 (1997)
Spencer-Smith, J., Wild, H., Innes-Ker, Å.H., Townsend, J., Duffy, C., Edwards, C., Ervin, K., Merritt, N., Pair, J.W.: Making faces: creating three-dimensional parameterized models of facial expression. Behav. Res. Meth., Instrum. Comput. 33(2), 115–123 (2001)
Gutiérrez-Maldonado, J., Rus-Calafell, M., González-Conde, J.: Creation of a new set of dynamic virtual reality faces for the assessment and training of facial emotion recognition ability. Virtual Reality 18(1), 61–71 (2014)
Dyck, M., Winbeck, M., Leiberg, S., Chen, Y., Gur, R.C., Mathiak, K.: Recognition profile of emotions in natural and virtual faces. PLoS One 3(11), e3628 (2008)
Fabri, M., Moore, D., Hobbs, D.: Mediating the expression of emotion in educational collaborative virtual environments: an experimental study. Virtual Reality 7(2), 66–81 (2004)
Ekman, P.: Facial expressions. Handb. Cogn. Emot. 53, 226–232 (1999)
Carrozzino, M., Tecchia, F., Bacinelli, S., Cappelletti, C., Bergamasco, M.: Lowering the development time of multimodal interactive application: the real-life experience of the xvr project. In: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, pp. 270–273. ACM (2005)
Gillies, M., Spanlang, B.: Comparing and evaluating real time character engines for virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators Virtual Environ. 19(2), 95–117 (2010)
Normand, J.-M., Spanlang, B., Tecchia, F., Carrozzino, M., Swapp, D., Slater, M.: Full body acting rehearsal in a networked virtual environmenta case study. Presence: Teleoperators Virtual Environ. 21(2), 229–243 (2012)
Weise, T., Bouaziz, S., Li, H., Pauly, M.: Realtime performance-based facial animation. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 30(4), 77 (2011). ACM
Bouaziz, S., Wang, Y., Pauly, M.: Online modeling for realtime facial animation. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 32(4), 40 (2013)
Terraciano, A., McCrae, R.R., Costa Jr., P.T.: Factorial and construct validity of the italian positive and negative affect schedule (panas). Eur. J. Psychol. Assess. 19(2), 131 (2003)
Watson, D., Clark, L.A., Tellegen, A.: Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the panas scales. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 54(6), 1063 (1988)
Manly, B.F.: Randomization, Bootstrap and Monte Carlo Methods in Biology, vol. 70. CRC Press, Boca Raton (2006)
Benjamini, Y., Hochberg, Y.: Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. J. Roy. Stat. Soc. Ser. B (Methodol.) 57(1), 289–300 (1995)
Kohler, C.G., Turner, T.H., Bilker, W.B., Brensinger, C.M., Siegel, S.J., Kanes, S.J., Gur, R.E., Gur, R.C.: Facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia: intensity effects and error pattern. Am. J. Psychiatry 160(10), 1768–1774 (2003)
Moser, E., Derntl, B., Robinson, S., Fink, B., Gur, R.C., Grammer, K.: Amygdala activation at 3t in response to human and avatar facial expressions of emotions. J. Neurosci. Meth. 161(1), 126–133 (2007)
Yee, N., Bailenson, J.N., Rickertsen, K.: A meta-analysis of the impact of the inclusion and realism of human-like faces on user experiences in interfaces. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–10. ACM (2007)
Slater, M., Frisoli, A., Tecchia, F., Guger, C., Lotto, B., Steed, A., Pfurtscheller, G., Leeb, R., Reiner, M., Sanchez-Vives, M.V., et al.: Understanding and realizing presence in the presenccia project. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 27(4), 90–93 (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Faita, C., Vanni, F., Lorenzini, C., Carrozzino, M., Tanca, C., Bergamasco, M. (2015). Perception of Basic Emotions from Facial Expressions of Dynamic Virtual Avatars. In: De Paolis, L., Mongelli, A. (eds) Augmented and Virtual Reality. AVR 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9254. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22888-4_30
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22888-4_30
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22887-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22888-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)