Emotional Expression as a Means of Communicating Virtual Human Personalities

Virtual humans with realistic behaviors have become prominent actors of compelling virtual experiences in domains as diverse as entertainment, education, and healthcare. A significant factor contributing to their behavioral realism is their personality, which characterizes distinctive traits consistent over time. Virtual humans can express personality traits through various channels such as voice, face, or body. In this chapter, we will focus on how emotional expression through facial expressions and body pose affect the communication of virtual human personalities. Throughout the chapter, we refer to the five-factor model of personality, which consists of five orthogonal dimensions of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. We will investigate their representation through the expression of the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust.