Experimental Investigation of Linguistic and Parametric Descriptions of Human Motion for Animation

Computers process and store human movement in a different manner from how humans perceive and observe human movement. We describe an investigation of the mapping between the linguistic descriptions people ascribe to animated motions and the parameters utilized to produce the animations. The mapping is validated by comparing both the linguistic and parametric descriptions to similarity measures obtained during experiments in which subjects made judgements about the similarity of pairs of animated motions. Analysis of the experimental data revealed that similarity judgements are not true distances (they do not form a metric space), but statistical tests and principal component analyses of the linguistic and parametric descriptions indicate correlations with the similarity judgements that provide the basis for mappings between the two descriptions. Although there are significant individual differences in the mappings across subjects, there is some indication that our methodology can be extended to provide a more robust direct mapping from linguistic descriptions to at least initial approximations of the corresponding parametric descriptions of the motion for use in computer animation systems.