Realistic gaze behavior of CCHD characters

[iva]

Hey Frank,

I have done a lot of work with eye gaze. Do you use any eyetracking in your experiment? If yes, you can reuse participant's gaze data and modify it a little bit to animate your avatar. For example, gaze following is the most natural thing in the world, and you could make your avatar follow the participant's gaze 70% of the time, and break eye-contact for 30%, where avatar is looking at something that interests it. Otherwise, I suggest prerecording somebody's natural eyegaze and using this to animate the eyes, since except from some robotic work, nobody has really managed to program a perfect simulation of natural gazing.

And don't forget blinks! They happen every 5-10 seconds, and should last between 100 and 500 ms.

[Frank Verberne]

Hi Iva,

Thanks for your reply! I do not use eye-tracking in my experiment (and don't have the equipment to do so), although I want participants to experience eye contact with a virtual agent. The way I'm accomplishing this right now is to have the agent face the participant, and the agent either looks straight ahead (thus making eye-contact when the participant looks at the agent), or averts its eyes. Have a look at the script attached to this message to see how I handle blinking and looking away behavior. For the looking away behavior, I take a random float between -15 & +15 for the yaw, and -10 & +10 for the pitch. The eye moves every 2-6 seconds. I don't know if these settings produce humanlike looking away behavior, but I'm pretty pleased with the result so far. If you have any suggestions to improve the parameters, let me know.

Do you have any reference for the percentages of maintaining and breaking eye-contact? If have seen some, but they distinguish between listening to someone and talking.

The blinking behavior I use is from here. Do you have a reference for the time between blinks and their duration? With this information, I could improve the eye-blinking behavior of my agent.

Thanks!
Frank