Commedia Virtuale: Theatre Inspiration for Expressive Avatars

We are investigating face, hand and body expressions to be applied to avatars of a virtual environment to improve their communication capabilities and enrich and facilitate their perception by users of the environment . We support the idea that avatars have to be designed in such a way as to express state of mind, mood and emotions that are easily understood by the users of the environment. We report on our work based on obtaining inspiration from the world of theatre. In this perspective Commedia dell’Arte and Noh theatre have been the focus of our attention. We explore key features of Commedia dell’Arte namely improvisation, exaggerated gestures and expressive postures, and investigate how their adoption in the design of avatars can be useful for Collaborative Virtual Environments. With the same objectives we look at another theatre style, the Noh theatre. We investigate the variety of masks and the complexity of the Noh choreography. The outcome of this work is a visual language for avatars made up of postures, gestures and appearances. We have concluded this investigation with the production of an experimental theatre play involving real and virtual actors.