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Perceived Naturalness of Interpolation Methods for Character Upper Body Animation

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Abstract

We compare the perceived naturalness of character animations generated using three interpolation methods: linear Euler, spherical linear quaternion, and spherical spline quaternion. While previous work focused on the mathematical description of these interpolation types, our work studies the perceptual evaluation of animated upper body character gestures generated using these interpolations. Ninety-seven participants watched 12 animation clips of a character performing four different upper body motions: a beat gesture, a deictic gesture, an iconic gesture, and a metaphoric gesture. Three animation clips were generated for each gesture using the three interpolation methods. The participants rated their naturalness on a 5-point Likert scale. The results showed that animations generated using spherical spline quaternion interpolation were perceived as significantly more natural than those generated using the other two interpolation methods. The findings held true for all subjects regardless of gender and animation experience and across all four gestures.

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Acknowledgements

The work reported in the paper is supported in part by NSF–IIS-Cyberlearning & Future Learning Technologies, Award #1821894, Title: Multimodal Affective Pedagogical Agents for Different Types of Learners.

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Correspondence to Xingyu Lei , Nicoletta Adamo-Villani or Bedrich Benes .

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Lei, X. et al. (2021). Perceived Naturalness of Interpolation Methods for Character Upper Body Animation. In: Bebis, G., et al. Advances in Visual Computing. ISVC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13017. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90439-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90439-5_9

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-90438-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-90439-5

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