Analysis of emotional gestures for the generation of expressive copying behaviour in an embodied agent

This paper presents a system capable of acquiring input from a video camera, processing information related to the expressivity of human movement and generating expressive copying behaviour of an Embodied Agent. We model a bi-directional communication between user and agent based on real-time analysis of movement expressivity and generation of expressive copying behaviour: while the user is moving, the agent responds with a gesture that exhibits the same expressive characteristics. An evaluation study based on a perceptual experiment with participants showed the effectiveness of the designed interaction. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.