Take a look at the new version of this page: [ beta version ]. Tell us what you think.

ABSTRACT

An experiment to determine factors that influence the perceived sex of virtual characters was conducted. Four different model types were used: highly realistic male and female models, an androgynous character, and a point light walker. Three different types of motion were applied to all models: motion captured male and female walks, and neutral synthetic walks. We found that both form and motion influence sex perception for these characters: for neutral synthetic motions, form determines perceived sex, whereas natural motion affects the perceived sex of both androgynous and realistic forms. These results have implications on variety and realism when simulating large crowds of virtual characters.

REFERENCES

• 1: Beardsworth, T., and Buckner, T. 1981. The ability to recognize oneself from a video recording of ones movements without seeing ones body. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 18, 1, 19--22.
• 2: Cutting, J., and Kozlowski, L. 1977. Recognizing friends by their walk: Gait perception without familiarity cues. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 9, 5, 353--356.
• 3: Cutting, J. 1978. Generation of synthetic male and female walkers through manipulation of a biomechanical invariant. Perception 7, 4, 393--403.
• 4: Dobbyn, S., McDonnell, R., Kavan, L., Collins, S., and O'Sullivan, C. 2006. Clothing the masses: Real-time clothed crowds with variation. In Eurographics Short Papers, 103--106.
• 5: Johansson, G. 1973. Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis. Perception and Psychophysics 14, 2, 201--211.
• 6: Johansson, G. 1976. Spatio-temporal differentiation and integration in visual motion perception. Psychological Research 38, 379--393.
• 7: Johnson, K. L., and Tassinary, L. G. 2005. Perceiving sex directly and indirectly: Meaning in motion and morphology. Psychological Science 16, 11, 890--897.
• 8: Johnson, K. L., and Tassinary, L. G. 2007. Compatibility of basic social perceptions determines perceived attractiveness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, 12, 5246--5251.
• 9: Kozlowski, L., and Cutting, J. 1977. Recognizing the sex of a walker from a dynamic point-light display. Perception and Psychophysics 21, 578--580.
• 10: Kozlowski, L., and Cutting, J. 1978. Recognizing the gender of walkers from point-lights mounted on ankles: Some second thoughts. Perception and Psychophysics 23, 459.
• 11: Mather, G., and Murdoch, L. 1994. Gender discrimination in biological motion displays based on dynamic cues. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 258, 273--279.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Animation

Keywords:
motion capture, perception, virtual humans