Audio-visual Personality Cues for Embodied Agents: An experimental evaluation

We report on an experiment in assigning personality to embodied agents reciting lines from modern poems. Three potential personality cues are investigated: gaze, speech and eyebrow movements. For each cue an introvert and an extrovert variant is defined. Little is known about the perceptual effects of combining personality cues. This is addressed by creating personality profiles, consisting of all possible combinations of the three cues of interest. The experimental results show that all three cues have a significant effect on the perception of personality. Concerning combinations of cues we find that including an extravert feature to an otherwise introvert agent does not imply that subjects perceive the agent as more extravert. Rather, we find that an animated character with two arbitrary extravert cues is perceived as significantly more extravert than a character with zero or one extravert cues, but significantly less extravert than one with three extravert cues. Finally, the results show that the personality profile does not influence the quality judgement of the animation.