Basic Emotions From Body Movements

Basic Emotions from Body Movements Ahmad S. Shaarani The Department of Computer Science University of Sheffield, UK Supervisor: Dr. Daniela M. Romano HUMAINE Summer School 2006 Casa Paganini Genova, Italy HUMAINE Summer School - September 2006

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Overview • • • • •

Scope of Research Basic Body Movements Emotional Expression Plan Experiment Conclusion

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Scope of Research • Research Area  Affective Computing & Believable Characters • 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).

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Scope of Research Believable 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. • Natural interface with machine - identify humans’ cues - interpret from whole body movement Why virtual human? HUMAINE Summer School - September 2006

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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. HUMAINE Summer School - September 2006

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Emotional Expression • 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

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Emotional Expression • This project is concern with capturing the emotional cues of non-verbal communication of the body. 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. • Four major components in LMA are Body, Space, Shape and Effort (Laban, 1960). • 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. HUMAINE Summer School - September 2006

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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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