The Saliency of Anomalies
in
Animated Human Characters
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Virtual characters are much in demand for animated movies,
games, and other applications. Rapid advances in performance capture
and advanced rendering techniques have allowed the movie industry in
particular to create characters that appear very human-like. However,
with these new capabilities has come the realization that such characters
are yet not quite “right.” One possible hypothesis is that these virtual
humans fall into an “Uncanny Valley”, where the viewer’s emotional response
is repulsion or rejection, rather than the empathy or emotional engagement
that their creators had hoped for. To explore these issues, we created
three animated vignettes of an arguing couple with detailed motion for
the face, eyes, hair, and body. In a set of perceptual experiments,
we explore the relative importance of different anomalies using two
different methods: a questionnaire to determine the emotional response
to the full-length vignettes, with and without facial motion and audio;
and a 2AFC (two alternative forced choice) task to compare the performance
of a virtual “actor” in short clips (extracts from the vignettes) depicting
a range of different facial and body anomalies. We found that the facial
anomalies are particularly salient, even when very significant body
animation anomalies are present.
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questions to Jessica Hodgins
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