Bodily Non-verbal Interaction with Virtual Characters

Alongside spoken communication human conversation has a non-verbal component that conveys complex and subtle emotional and interpersonal information. This information is conveyed largely bodily with postures, gestures and facial expression. In order to capture the Kansei aspects of human interaction within a virtual environment, it is therefore vital to model this bodily interaction. This type of interaction is largely subconscious and therefore difficult to model explicitly. We therefore propose a data-driven learning approach to creating characters capable of non-verbal bodily interaction with humans.