Model of the perception of smiling virtual character

A smile may convey different communicative intentions depending on subtle characteristics of the facial expression. Moreover, during an interaction, the expression of smile impacts on the observer’s perception of both the social stance of the speaker and of the content of the talk. In this paper, we describe a perceptual study where we explore the effects of virtual characters displaying different types of smiles (namely politeness and amusement) when speaking on the user’s perception. Based on the collected data, a model to automatically compute the user’s potential perception of the virtual character’s social stance depending on its smiling behavior and on its gender has been proposed.