Evaluating the emotional content of human motions on real and virtual characters

In order to analyze the emotional content of motions portrayed by different characters, we created real and virtual replicas of an actor exhibiting six basic emotions: sadness, happiness, surprise, fear, anger and disgust. In addition to the video of the real actor, his actions were applied to five virtual body shapes: a low and high resolution virtual counterpart, a cartoon-like character, a wooden mannequin, and a zombie-like character (Figure 1). Participants were asked to rate the actions based on a list of 41 more complex emotions. We found that the perception of emotional actions is highly robust and to the most part independent of the character's body.