Computer generated virtual humans play an important role in many 3d graphical applications, and are often used to evoke empathic responses from human users, due to their human form and behaviour. Most movie and game studios aim to produce appealing virtual characters that audiences will react to in a positive manner. However, humans are very experienced at observing the motion and appearance of...

This paper presents a hybrid conversation group of talking heads, and discusses some solutions concerning emotions and social-emotional signs in more detail. A hybrid conversation group consists of real and virtual members, which meet to discuss some specific theme. The use of such a group, together with digital storytelling techniques, is a promising way of engaging the user in the exploration...

Chinese Lexicon Project (Sze et al., 2014) summarized lexical decision response data of 2,500 Chinese characters. The original analysis has showed that the newest character frequency norm accounts the most variance of reaction times. The variance of these response data are analyzed in terms of the character frequency, strokes, and structures in use of the norms from Taiwan. First of all, simpli...

Earlier studies have shown that both gender and masculine or feminine traits affects judgements about a person's qualities. This study builds upon earlier research and investigates the relation between voice and appearance with respect to gender based stereotype judgements, by letting participants listen to and then rate two of totally eight different digital characters, four female and four ma...

This paper presents writer-independent offline handwritten character recognition for Ethiopic script. The recognition is based on the characteristics of primitive strokes that make up characters. The spatial relationships of primitives whose combinations form complex structures of Ethiopic characters are used as a basis for recognition. Although this approach efficiently recognizes properly wri...

The segmentation accuracy of Roman cursive characters, especially touched characters, is essential for the high performance of Optical Character Recognition Systems. This paper presents a new approach for non-linear segmentation of multiple touched Roman cursive characters based on genetic algorithm. Initially, a possible segmentation zone is detected and then best segmentation path is evolved ...

Using synthetic characters to support children’s personal, social and emotional education requires that the emotional response elicited from the children is that desired by educators and stakeholders. This paper discusses an approach to understanding children’s emotional interpretation of character’s behaviour in a complex social situation. We outline this approach based on Theory of Mind conce...