Abstract
In order to convey user’s feeling through his/her avatar on remote communication, not only verbal information but also non-verbal information such as tone of voice, facial expression, and gesture are important. Although some studies propose methods to express basic emotions on avatar, no method has been established to create facial animation that expresses complicated emotional states like “happy but embarrassed” yet. This paper proposes a method to create facial animation expressing complicated emotional state by combining involuntary facial actions of suppressed real emotion and voluntary facial actions of suppressing fake emotion. The proposed method is explained in a case of “Tsundere” that consists of real happiness and fake calm/anger. 18 facial animations were created and evaluated by Sheffé’s method. The experimental results revealed that blushing, an involuntary action for happy, enhanced impression that the avatar sincerely felt happy. On the contrary, smiling faces without involuntary blushing gave impression that the avatar pretended to be happy with fake smile. It indicates that the proposed method that expresses real emotion by involuntary action unit can express real emotion selectively.
