The significance of textures for affective interfaces

Abstract. This paper reports experiments demonstrating that the extent to which subjects ascribe emotions to VR faces is highly dependent on textures applied to the face. We demonstrate this for both a photo-realistic vs. non-photo-realistic texture pair and for a male vs. female texture pair. In both cases, experiments were conducted over the Internet on still frames taken from a well-controlled VR emotion modelling system. Given the enormous extent to which textures determine emotion recognition, we consider this a critical area for future research in affective virtual agents.