A Framework For Interpersonal Attitude And Non-Verbal Communication In Improvisational Visual Media Production

Computer generated characters are now commonplace in television and film. In some media productions like the MatrixTM they feature as frequently as the real cast. A visual media that is being explored by the research community is that of real-time improvisational theatre using virtual characters. This is a non-trivial problem with many research challenges; this paper starts to address one, which is the automatic generation of appropriate non-verbal communication between characters based on their personality and relationship to one another. We focus on our of model interpersonal attitude used for generating expressive postures and eye gaze in computer animated characters. Our model consists of two principle dimensions, affiliation and status. It takes into account the relationships between the attitudes of two characters and allows for a large degree of variation between characters, both in how they react to other characters’ behaviour and in the ways in which they express attitude.