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.

• Legal notice:
  

  Copyright (c) Pielaszek Research, all rights reserved.
  The above materials, including auxiliary resources, are subject to Publisher's copyright and the Author(s) intellectual rights. Without limiting Author(s) rights under respective Copyright Transfer Agreement, no part of the above documents may be reproduced without the express written permission of Pielaszek Research, the Publisher. Express permission from the Author(s) is required to use the above materials for academic purposes, such as lectures or scientific presentations.
  In every case, proper references including Author(s) name(s) and URL of this webpage: https://science24.com/paper/28473 must be provided.