An Empirical Analysis on Emotional Body Gesture for Affective Virtual Communication

• Published in: International journal of computer science issues Vol. 12; no. 1; p. 101
• Main Authors: Weerasinghe, Prabath, Rajapakse, R P C Janaka, Marasinghe, Ashu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Mahebourg International Journal of Computer Science Issues (IJCSI) 01.01.2015
• Subjects: Age; Avatars; Collaborative virtual environments; Computer science; Demographics; Emotions; Empirical analysis; Human; Humanoid; Mathematical models
• ISSN: 1694-0814; 1694-0784

Development of the engineering on virtual environment over last decades have been attempted to establish a metaphor of human communication scheme, utilizing avatar models as user proxies. Many of the avatar models in present Collaborative Virtual Environments have still built on the universality hypothesis, which tends to ignore the multiplicities of human expressions. In such context, this research attempted to conduct an empirical study on the emotional body gestures of avatar models considering the differences in terms of age, gender, body size and humanoid. The observable differences in average emotional intensity levels implied that the age, gender, body size and humanoid of avatar effect on expression of emotions, especially the differences of gender and humanoid are highly significant in the results revealed. The findings of this study factually demands future development of Avatar models based on demographic and physical features to improve overall-effectiveness of virtual communication.