Corpus Creation and Perceptual Evaluation of Expressive Theatrical Gestures

Abstract

Abstract. While human communication involves rich, complex and expressive gestures, available corpora of captured motions used for the animation of virtual characters contain actions ranging from locomotion to everyday life motions. We aim at creating a novel corpus of expressive and meaningful gestures, and we focus on body movements and gestures involved in theatrical scenarios. In this paper we propose a methodology for building a corpus of full-body theatrical gestures based on a magician show enriched with affective content. We then validate the constructed corpus of theatrical gestures and sequences through several perceptual studies focusing on the complexity of the produced movements as well as the recognizability of the additional affective content.

Perceptual Validation for the Generation of Expressive Movements from End-Effector Trajectories

“…In this section we review the expressive motion capture database used to evaluate the methodological framework introduced in Section 3 and depicted in Figure 2. This database was initially reported in [11] and further extended for the work presented here. The proposed database was designed for the analysis and synthesis of expressive full-body movements.…”

A review of computable expressive descriptors of human motion

“…The meaning can be characterized by a set of signs that can be linguistic elements or significant actions. This is the case when expressing narrative scenarios in theatrical situations [7], or constructing novel utterances in sign Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored.…”