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A Model of Nonverbal Communication and Interpersonal Relationship Between Virtual Actors*

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A Model of Nonverbal Communication and Interpersonal Relationship Between Virtual Actors* A Model of Nonverbal Communication and Interpersonal Relationship between Virtual Actors* P. Bécheiraz and D. Thalmann Computer Graphics Lab (LIG), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland This paper presents a model of nonverbal communication and interpersonal relationship between virtual actors. Nonverbal communication improves their believability. They react not only to the presence of the other actors but also to their postures. Furthermore, their interpersonal relationships are affected by the issue of social interactions. To avoid homogenous group behaviors, each actor is set with a different character profile. We present an application of this model to create actors involved in social interactions in a virtual public garden. The animation of virtual actors is based on the library AGENTlib which is dedicated to the management of agent entities able to coordinate perception and action. 1 Introduction A public garden is a place where social interactions occur. People come there for a walk and to meet each other. Therefore, it is an ideal place to study social interactions and changes in social relationships. The way social interactions take place affects relationships. The friendliness or interest of a person for another one evolves according to the attitude adopted by this other person during a communication. Its attitude might have been for instance very disappointing or surprisingly nice. As people are usually not talking loudly, for other people not involved in the conversation, it is hard to hear a word people are saying and only gestures and postures can be watched. Nevertheless, by watching this body language, it is possible to infer the type of relationship between two or three persons and how the conversation is taking place. For instance, how well they know each other or how interested they are in the conversation. Thus, the use of a model of nonverbal communication for virtual actors can increase their believability although they do not use an audible spoken language. They adopt and respond to postures. We use this model to create a virtual public garden where synthetic actors come for a walk and try to engage in communication with other actors. Virtual actors reacting only to the presence of the others lack of believability and we believe that this can be improved by the use of elements of nonverbal communication. As for real people, virtual actors should have a specific behavior and the issue of a communication should affect them. Therefore, virtual actors are provided with a character and a description of their interpersonal relationship with other actors. Their character influences how they evaluate a posture and an emotional state describes their happiness. Actors interact by adopting postures in response to the postures of the others. The response posture corresponds to an attitude resulting from the attitude of the other person. But, in the same context, the reaction of an actor will be different from that of another because its character influences its style of nonverbal communication and its perception of postures and the postures it adopts. The interpersonal relationship between two actors determines if they begin a communication and the issue of this communication affects their relationship. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we review some papers related to behavioral animation and social behaviors. In section 3, we give a definition of nonverbal communication and we describe the elements of nonverbal communication we focus on. In section 4, we present the behavioral model we implemented to control the social behavior of actors using nonverbal communication. We explain how they evaluate and select postures according to their character and how their relationships evolve. In section 5, we describe how the public garden and the actors are modeled with the libraries SCENElib and BODYlib [4] dedicated to the creation of scenes of 3D objects and human actors and how actors are animated with the library AGENTlib. The purpose of this library is the management of agents able to coordinate perception and action and the scheduling of execution of concurrent or sequential actions. Finally, in section 6, we illustrate this model of nonverbal communication with an example of a communication involving three actors. *Published in Proc. Computer Animation'96, IEEE Computer Society Press, June 1996 2 Background The use of behavioral animation to generate computer animation is a well explored domain. Reynolds [18] described the first use of a behavioral model to produce a flocking behavior. Other papers focused mainly on specific motion such as locomotion, grasping, and lifting [3, 6, 8, 13, 17]. Tu and Terzopoulos [19] created autonomous fishes living in a physically modeled virtual marine world. Hodgins et al. [10] described dynamic athletic behaviors. Unuma et al. [20] modeled human figure locomotion with emotions. Other papers presented systems to interact with virtual creatures. Maes et al. [11] designed a full-body interaction system with a virtual dog. Perlin [16] described virtual actors appearing to be emotionally responsive. Random noise functions were used together with rythmic motions to generate lifelike behaviors. Research in autonomous robots have also focused on social behaviors. Mataric [12] described complex group behavior produced from simple local interactions. Dautenhahn [7] studied interactions between individualized robots able to recognize each other in order to establish relationships. Our model of nonverbal communication attempts to go further. The believability of virtual actors is improved by their capability to interpret and use a nonverbal language. 3 Nonverbal communication 3.1 Definition and examples A nonverbal communication is concerned with postures and their indications on what people are feeling. Postures are the means to communicate and are defined by a specific position of the arms and legs and angles of the body. Usually, people don’t use consciously nonverbal communication, but they instinctively understand it to a considerable extent and respond to it without any explicit reasoning. As stated in [2], as much as 65 percent of the substance of a face to face communication is conveyed by nonverbal elements and many psychologists suggest that a posture is the result of an underlying attitude and is an important means of conveying interpersonal attitudes, an attitude being a mental state inducing a particular posture. The effects of nonverbal communication, though unconscious, can't be ignored. Now, let us examine some typical examples of nonverbal behaviors between two and three persons. The first example describes two persons talking to each other. Two persons engaged in an intimate conversation often stand directly facing each other. The orientation of their bodies and feet shows how much they are interested in the conversation. The body and feet of the first are oriented towards the other, showing that he or she seems to be interested in him or her. Meanwhile, one foot of the second begins to shift, pointing that the interest of the second person is waning or the second one finds the topic under away, probably meaning discussion not very interesting or exciting and would like to escape. The second example is concerned with two persons communicating with each other and rejecting a third one. Two persons are standing in an open triangle formation commonly used for friendly conversation. It leaves a potential opening for a third person to join them. A third person comes near them, holding his hands clasped in front of him in a defensive manner. He attempts to join the group, but the first two respond by rejecting him out. One raises his left arm, forming a barrier. The other deliberatly avoids making eye contact with the newcomer. They have formed a closed formation, suppressing any possibility for a new person to join them. The newcomer feels rejected and leaves unhappily. The third example involves a man and a woman. The man tries to court the woman. But his postures are aggressive. He is raising one arm to the woman, cutting off one possibility of escape. The other hand is on his hip, emphazising the sexual threat. The woman reacts with a defensive body language. She turns her head to avoid eye contact and takes one step backward. 3.2 Elements of nonverbal communication The elements we use for a nonverbal communication are the relative positioning of both persons and their postures. Furthermore, the emotional state of an actor affects the way it walks [5, 20]. A low emotional state will give a sad look to its walking and a high one a happy look. Figure 1 shows the two extremes of walking. - 2 - Autonomous Virtual Humans Sad walking Happy walking Fig. 1. Walking affected by emotional state 3.2.1 Relative positioning The relative positioning consists of proximity and orientation. There is a range within which variation of these two dimensions is possible, and this variation denotes modifications in interpersonal relationship. The proximity dimension is the distance between two persons. Hall [9] suggested that there are four proximity zones. The first zone, within 50 centimeters in front of the body, is for intimate relationship, reserved for partners, children, or close family members. The second zone is for close relationship like friends and most conversations will take place within this personal zone between 50 centimeters and 1.2 meters away. More formal and impersonal interactions occur within a social zone between 1.2 and 2.75 meters away and a public zone within 2.75 meters away and above. The distance between individuals is linked to their relationship. For instance, if one person likes another, his or her relationship with him or her is good, resulting in a close proximity. But, if the other person comes too close, the proximity becomes too small, so that the first person backs away. The orientation dimension is the angle at which one person faces another, usually the angle between a line joining both persons and the plane of the shoulder of the first person.
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