Copying behaviour of expressive motion

In this paper we present an agent that can analyse certain human fullbody movements in order to respond in an expressive manner with copying behaviour. Our work focuses on the analysis of human full-body movement for animating a virtual agent, called Greta, able to perceive and interpret users' expressivity and to respond properly. Our system takes in input video data related to a dancer moving in the space. Analysis of video data and automatic extraction of motion cues is done in EyesWeb. We consider the amplitude and speed of movement. Then, to generate the animation for our agent, we need to map the motion cues on the corresponding expressivity parameters of the agent. We also present a behaviour markup language for virtual agents to define the values of expressivity parameters on gestures. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.