Culture-related differences in aspects of behavior for virtual characters across Germany and Japan

Integrating culture as a parameter into the behavioral models of virtual characters to simulate cultural differences is becoming more and more popular. But do these differences affect the user’s perception? In the work described in this paper, we integrated aspects of non-verbal behavior as well as communication management behavior into the behavioral models of virtual characters for the two cultures of Germany and Japan in order to find out which of these aspects affect human observers of the target cultures. We give a literature review pointing out the expected differences in these two cultures and describe the analysis of a multi-modal corpus including video recordings of German and Japanese interlocutors. After integrating our findings into a demonstrator featuring a German and a Japanese scenario, we presented the virtual scenarios to human observers of the two target cultures in an evaluation study.