Investigating Macroexpressions and Microexpressions in Computer Graphics Animated Faces

Due to varied personal, social, or even cultural situations, people sometimes conceal or mask their true emotions. These suppressed emotions can be expressed in a very subtle way by brief movements called microexpressions. We investigate human subjects’ perception of hidden emotions in virtual faces, inspired by recent psychological experiments. We created animations with virtual faces showing some facial expressions and inserted brief secondary expressions in some sequences, in order to try to convey a subtle second emotion in the character. Our evaluation methodology consists of two sets of experiments, with three different sets of questions. The first experiment verifies that the accuracy and concordance of the participant’s responses with synthetic faces matches the empirical results done with photos of real people in the paper by X.-b. Shen, Q. Wu, and X.-l. Fu, 2012, “Effects of the duration of expressions on the recognition of microexpressions,” Journal of Zhejiang University Science B, 13(3), 221–230. The second experiment verifies whether participants could perceive and identify primary and secondary emotions in virtual faces. The third experiment tries to evaluate the participant’s perception of realism, deceit, and valence of the emotions. Our results show that most of the participants recognized the foreground (macro) emotion and most of the time they perceived the presence of the second (micro) emotion in the animations, although they did not identify it correctly in some samples. This experiment exposes the benefits of conveying microexpressions in computer graphics characters, as they may visually enhance a character’s emotional depth through subliminal microexpression cues, and consequently increase the perceived social complexity and believabilit

Modelagem e simulação do tráfego de veículos e controle semafórico em um ambiente virtual

Simulate urban traffic realistically in a virtual environment is a complex task to implement, since many characteristics need to be developed. In this paper, we propose the use of different techniques to model and control the interaction of the elements of a simulation. In particular, we present a model physics-based for the vehicles to collisions avoid, an access control policy based on reserves and a model of synchronization of traffic signals using Petri net. The results show that the proposed model reproduces the behavior expected for the simulated contexts.Simular o trânsito de áreas urbanas de maneira realista em um ambiente virtual é uma tarefa complexa de ser implementada, pois muitas características precisam ser desenvolvidas. Neste trabalho, propomos a utilização de diversas técnicas para modelar e controlar a interação dos elementos constituintes de uma simulação. Em particular, apresentamos um modelo baseado em Física para que os veículos evitem colisões, uma política de controle de acesso a cruzamentos baseada em reservas e um modelo de sincronização de semáforos utilizando rede de Petri. Os resultados apresentados demonstram que os modelos propostos reproduzem os comportamentos esperados para os contextos simulados

Evaluating Perceived Trust From Procedurally Animated Gaze

Adventure role playing games (RPGs) provide players with increasingly expansive worlds, compelling storylines, and meaningful fictional character interactions. Despite the fast-growing richness of these worlds, the majority of interactions between the player and non-player characters (NPCs) still remain scripted. In this paper we propose using an NPC’s animations to reflect how they feel towards the player and as a proof of concept, investigate the potential for a straightforward gaze model to convey trust. Through two perceptual experiments, we find that viewers can distinguish between high and low trust animations, that viewers associate the gaze differences specifically with trust and not with an unrelated attitude (aggression), and that the effect can hold for different facial expressions and scene contexts, even when viewed by participants for a short (five second) clip length. With an additional experiment, we explore the extent that trust is uniquely conveyed over other attitudes associated with gaze, such as interest, unfriendliness, and admiration