An nvc emotional model for conversational virtual humans in a 3d chatting environment

Junghyun Ahn, Stephane Gobron, David Garcia, Quentin Silvestre, Daniel Thalmann and Ronan Bulic

Proceedings of the VII Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects 2012 (2012)

Abstract

This paper proposes a new emotional model for Virtual Humans (VHs) in a conversational environment. As a part of a multi - users emotional 3D - chatting system, this paper focus on how to formulate and visualize the flow of emotional state defined by the Valence - ArousalDominance (VAD) parameters. From this flow of emotion over time, we successfully visualized the change of VHs’ emotional state through the proposed emoFaces and emoMotions. The notion of Non - Verbal Communication (NVC) was exploited for driving plausible emotional expressions during conversation. With the help of a proposed interface, where a user can parameterize emotional state and flow, we succeeded to vary the emotional expressions and reactions of VHs in a 3D conversation scene.