Papers about Body posture

In this paper we present RealActor, a character behavior realization system for embodied conversational agents based on the Behavior Markup Language (BML). Developed several years ago as part of the SAIBA framework, BML is an XML dialect for describing physical realizations of multimodal human behaviors. It allows modeling of complex communicative utterances which include both verbal and non-verbal behavior. BML elements represent various primitive actions (e.g. speech, facial and body gestures) and multimodal behavior can... Read more

Effective speakers engage their whole body when they gesture. It is difficult, however, to create such full body motion in animated agents while still supporting a large and flexible gesture set. This paper presents a hybrid system that combines motion capture data with a procedural animation system for arm gestures. Procedural approaches are well suited to supporting a large and easily modified set of gestures, but are less adept at producing subtle, full body movement.... Read more

Embodied agents are a powerful paradigm for current and future multimodal interfaces, yet require high effort and expertise for their creation, assembly and animation control. Therefore, open animation engines and high-level control languages are required to make embodied agents accessible to researchers and developers. In this paper, we present EMBR, a new realtime character animation engine that offers a high degree of animation control via the EMBRScript language. We argue that a new layer of... Read more

Psychology suggests highly synchronized expressions of emotion across different modalities. Few experiments jointly studied the relative contribution of facial expression and body posture to the overall perception of emotion. Computational models for expressive virtual characters have to consider how such combinations will be perceived by users. This paper reports on two studies exploring how subjects perceived a virtual agent. The first study evaluates the contribution of the facial and postural expressions to the overall perception... Read more

Embodied Conversational Agents (also known as ECA) are animated software agents (usually very similar to the human figure) which represent the possibility of extending the aim of common conversation systems and perform non appropriate verbal behavior, such as facial expressions, looks, gestures and processing of natural language in all its levels, contributing to a better understanding of a message. Bickmore (2003) defines such agents as entities which use, in real time, speech, gestures, observation (among... Read more

What is the hallmark of success in human-agent interaction? In animation and robotics, many have concentrated in the looks of the agent - whether the appearance is realistic of lifelike. We present an alternative benchmark that lies in the dyad and not the agent alone: Does the agent's behavior evoke intersubjectivity from the user? That is, in both conscious and unconscious communication, do users react to behaviorally realistic agents in the same way they react... Read more

In face-to-face dialogue, the participants have visible as well as audible resources for social communication, that is, not just words and prosody, but also hand gestures, facial displays, gaze direction and timing, body orientation, and objects in their shared environment. We propose that some non-verbal acts play an important role in the participants' collaboration, so that the study ofthese non-verbal acts in dialogue is a promising way to understand basic processes in social communication. Read more

We aim at defining conversational agents that exhibit qualitatively distinctive behaviors. To this aim we provide a small set of parameters to allow one to define behavior profiles and then leave to the system the task of animating the agent. Our approach is to manipulate the behavior tendency of the agent depending on its communicative intention and emotional state. In this paper we will define the concepts of Baseline and Dynamicline. The Baseline of an agent... Read more

Against the background that recent studies on embodied conversational agents demonstrate the importance of their behavior, an experimental study is presented that assessed the effects of different nonverbal behaviors of an embodied conversational agent on the experiences and evaluations of the user as well as on their behavior. 50 participants conducted a conversation with different versions of the virtual agent Max, whose nonverbal communication was manipulated with regard to eyebrow movements and self-touching gestures. In... Read more

In Virtual Reality environments, real humans can meet virtual humans to collaborate on tasks. The agent Max is such a virtual human, providing the human user with a face-toface collaboration partner in the SFB 360 construction tasks. This paper describes how Max can assist by combining manipulative capabilities for assembly actions with conversational capabilities for mixed-initiative dialogue. During the interaction, Max employs speech, gaze, facial expression, and gesture and is able to initiate assembly actions.... Read more