A computer based system to design expressive avatars

TelMeA - Expressive avatars in asynchronous communications

TelMeA is an asynchronous online community system that uses avatars to enact the messages of the users. We present an overview of the system, including the results of a usability study and its effect on the redesign of the system. Furthermore we present an empirical evaluation of the avatar’s animations. The animations offer a wide repertoire of expressions along the valence dimension, but addi...

Face Value: Towards Emotionally Expressive Avatars

This paper investigates how inhabitants of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) can communicate with each other through channels other than speech, and it is primarily concerned with the perception of facial expressions of emotion in CVEs. We outline our experimental work on emotion recognition and investigate to what extent findings from real life socio-psychological research can be appli...

Emotionally expressive avatars for collaborative virtual environments

Commedia Virtuale: Theatre Inspiration for Expressive Avatars

We are investigating face, hand and body expressions to be applied to avatars of a virtual environment to improve their communication capabilities and enrich and facilitate their perception by users of the environment . We support the idea that avatars have to be designed in such a way as to express state of mind, mood and emotions that are easily understood by the users of the environment. We ...

Cross-Cultural Study of Expressive Avatars∗

Avatars play an important role in international online communities. While certain simple expressions, such as facial emotional expressions are cultural independent, more complex expressions might not be. Therefore we conducted a cross-cultural study to investigate the influence of the users’ cultural background (Japanese or Dutch) on their perception of avatar’s expressions in terms of perceive...