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Facial asymmetry and affective communication in 3D Online Virtual Society

Junghyun Ahn ,  Nan Wang ,  Ronan Boulic 

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne CH-1015, Switzerland

Abstract

The affective communication in cyber-world is widely spread through the internet mostly in textual form. From the user’s point of view this text-based information may hinder smooth communication arising difficulties to understand exact meaning or subtle change of mood and situation. In this context, the authors believe that a semi-automated simulation of facial expression through a user’s 3D avatar can facilitate the process of the online affective communication. More specifically, we exploit the aspect of facial asymmetry, which can efficiently convey the mixed feelings of the user.

In order to achieve this goal, we first designed and developed a prototype online virtual society, where the users can meet, chat and transfer emotions through their own 3D avatar. This environment is accessible by a common web browser, where the virtual world and network connections were built on top of the Unity game engine. During the conversation the facial expression are simulated automatically by the Valence-Arousal-Dominance values generated from the text message or manual input.

For the asymmetry, the left and right hand sides of the face are controlled independently. Based on the psychological findings, the left side of face takes charge of direct and intuitive emotional feeling. On the other hand, the right side of face is more controlled and restricted due to the social conventions. Extracting this complex information is somehow a big challenge. However, as the first step, we concentrated our approach in two different ways: (1) ambivalent face editing for mixed feeling; and (2) asymmetric face control by a left/right bias parameter. We also created a set of words which are related to the asymmetric expressions for direct use in case of appearance in the sentence.

In the future, we plan to evaluate the meaningful asymmetric parameters that help users to easily understand the context of emotional conversation. The plausibility of the asymmetric facial animation will be also explored by an evaluation conducted in the proposed online virtual society.

 

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Presentation: Oral at CyberEmotions conference, by Junghyun Ahn
See On-line Journal of CyberEmotions conference

Submitted: 2012-12-28 14:12
Revised:   2012-12-28 14:12