HUMAINE Summer School - September 2006 1

Basic Emotions from Basic Emotions from Body MovementsBody Movements

HUMAINE Summer School 2006Casa PaganiniGenova, Italy

Ahmad S. ShaaraniThe Department of Computer Science

University of Sheffield, UK

Supervisor: Dr. Daniela M. Romano

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• Scope of Research• Basic Body Movements • Emotional Expression• Plan Experiment• Conclusion

Overview

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Scope of Research

• Psychology tries to discover the nature of emotions and personality.

• Computer Science tries to simulate the effect that those have on human being and use it to make HCI more natural. (Nadia, 2005)

• The research that is part of HCI + emotion naturalness is called Affective Computing (Picard, 1997).

• Research Area Affective Computing &Believable Characters

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• Natural interface with machine - identify humans’ cues - interpret from whole body movement

Scope of ResearchBelievable Characters

• Virtual humans are plausible and believable to be perceived by the users.• Should reflect the simulated situation like the users expect them to do.• It is why a concrete understanding of humans behaviour is needed.

Why virtual human?

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Basic Body Movements• Basic emotions from facial expression have an agreed meaning across and within cultures (Ekman, 1999)

• “The first cues perceived by an individual when others are

approaching are embedded in body movements and

gestures” (Montepare, 1999)

• (Wallbott, 1998) has study the use of body movement, posture and gesture as cues to the emotional state of individuals.

• “Knees will shake and hands will tremble when someone

experience fear” (Richmond & McCrosky, 2000)

• Coulson (2004) conducted a study designed to investigate the attribution of emotion to static body postures using a mannequin figures.

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• Emotional Body Movements to recognize, understand and model human emotion.

• How humans understand emotions?• Language & Sound of the voice• Non-verbal communication• Context

• Non-verbal communication Facial expressions, body posture & body movements

Emotional Expression

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• This project is concern with capturing the emotional cues of

non-verbal communication of the body.

Emotional Expression

Why non-verbal communication?

• Non-verbal communication is the medium through which a

virtual human can convey an emotional state.• It is the means through which to achieve certain expression.• User normally have a specific expectation of how a virtual

human should behave or respond in any given situation.

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Emotional Expression - LMA• Clear description of emotion.

• Laban Movement Analysis (LMA).• Find out some characteristic of general movement features and use it as a unit to be analysed.

• Body which body part are move, where the movements are initiate and how the movement spread.• Space how large the mover kinesphere.• Shape changing forms that the body makes in space.• Effort Dynamic qualities of movement / inner attitude towards using energy.

• Four major components in LMA are Body, Space, Shape and Effort (Laban, 1960).

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Experiment

• Identify cues of humans’ movement.

• Create 3D animated virtual human that expressing quality body movements of certain basic emotions.

• Conduct a survey to analyse users perception and acceptance of expressive movement.

• Analyse the data using statistical analysis.

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example of still images

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Conclusion• This research try to relate the parameters for movement of the whole body to basic emotion.

• Focus on Ekman’s six basic emotions.

• Identify cues of humans’ movement.

• Create believable virtual human that are able to express emotions in a manner that is recognise by humans’ spectators.

• Analyse users perception and acceptance using statistical analysis.

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