Evaluating the emotional content of human motions on real and virtual characters
Rachel McDonnell, Sophie Jörg, Joanna McHugh Power, Fiona Nora Newell, Carol O’Sullivan · 2008
In order to analyze the emotional content of motions portrayed by different characters, we created real and virtual replicas of an actor exhibiting six basic emotions: sadness, happiness, surprise, fear, anger and disgust. In addition to the video of the real actor, his actions were applied to five virtual body shapes: a low and high resolution virtual counterpart, a cartoon-like character, a wooden mannequin, and a zombie-like character (Figure 1). Participants were asked to rate the actions based on a list of 41 more complex emotions. We found that the perception of emotional actions is highly robust and to the most part independent of the character's body.