How Do Iconic Gestures Convey Visuo-Spatial Information? Bringing Together Empirical, Theoretical, and Simulation Studies

We investigate the question of how co-speech iconic gestures are used to convey visuo-spatial information in an interdisciplinary way, starting with a corpus-based empirical and theoretical perspective on how a typology of gesture form and a partial ontology of gesture meaning are related. Results provide the basis for a computational modeling approach that allows us to simulate the production of speaker-specific gesture forms to be realized with virtual agents. An evaluation of our simulation results and our methodology shows that the model is able to successfully approximate human gestural behavior use of iconic gestures, and moreover, that gestural behavior can improve how humans rate a virtual agent in terms of eloquence, competence, human-likeness, or likeability.