Individualized reaction movements for virtual humans

Abstract

Virtual Humans creation aims to provide virtual characters with realistic behavior, which implies endowing them with autonomy in an inhabited virtual environment. Autonomous behavior consists in interacting with users or the environment and reacting to stimulus or events. Reactions are unconscious behaviors which are not often implemented in virtual humans. Frequently, virtual humans show repetitive and robotic movements which tend to decrease realism.To improve believability in virtual humans we need to provide individuality. Individualization is achieved by using human characteristics like personality, gender, emotions, etc. In this paper, we propose to use those individual descriptors to synthesize different kinds of reactions. We aim that individualized virtual humans react in a different way to the same stimuli. This approach is achieved by observing real people reacting. Thanks to those observations, we stereotyped reactive movements that can be described by individual characteristics. We use inverse kinematics techniques to synthesize the movements. This allows us to change reaction movements according to the characteristics of the stimuli and to the individuality of a character.