Effect of Appearance and Animation Realism on the Perception of Emotionally Expressive Virtual Humans

Abstract: 3D Virtual Human technology is growing with several potential applications in health, education, business and telecommunications. Investigating the perception of these virtual humans can help guide to develop better and more effective applications. Recent developments show that the appearance of the virtual humans reached to a very realistic level. However, there is not yet adequate analysis on the perception of appearance and animation realism for emotionally expressive virtual humans. In this paper, we designed a user experiment and analyzed the effect of a realistic virtual human's appearance realism and animation realism in varying emotion conditions. We found that higher appearance realism and higher animation realism leads to higher social presence and higher attractiveness ratings. We also found significant effects of animation realism on perceived realism and emotion intensity levels. Our study sheds light into how appearance and animation realism effects the perception of highly realistic virtual humans in emotionally expressive scenarios and points out to future directions.