Investigating Emotion Style in Human Faces Using Clustering Methods.

For the past decade, performance-driven animation has been a reality in games and movies. While capturing and transferring emotions from human beings to avatars is a reasonably solved problem, it is accepted that humans express themselves in different ways, with personal styles, even when performing the same action. This article proposes a method to extract the style of human beings' facial movement when expressing emotions in posed images.

Is the Perceived Comfort With CG Characters Increasing With Their Novelty?

Realistic characters from movies and games can cause strangeness and involuntary feelings in viewers, an effect known as the uncanny valley (UV). This article revisits the central UV hypothesis, proposed by Masahiro Mori in 1970, to evaluate its impact on people's perception of characters created using computer graphics (CG). More precisely, our goal is to answer the following questions: 1) Are people feeling more comfortable with more recent CG characters than the older ones? 2) Does charisma or familiarity with virtual humans correlate with perceived comfort? To answer these questions, we first replicated an experiment from 2012 and compared the perception concerning CG characters then and now, and then we included images of more recent CG characters in our analysis.

Evaluating and Optimizing Evacuation Plans for Crowd Egress.

Evacuation planning is an important and difficult task in building design. The proposed framework can identify optimal evacuation plans using decision points, which control the ratio of agents that select a particular route at a specific spatial location. The authors optimize these ratios to achieve the best evacuation based on a quantitatively validated metric for evacuation performance.