Look Me in the Lines: The Impact of Stylization on the Recognition of Expressions and Perceived Personality

We are increasingly approaching the point where computer-based technology is truly ambient and omnipresent. People tend to personify their technical servants, including giving them human names as well as attributing personality traits and intentions to them. The more those devices advance from simple tools to intelligent assistants the more seriously we need to take this personification. That is, if the computers perform human-like tasks in collaboration with humans, and humans already tend to treat computers as human-like, it is only reasonable to give those devices a human-like appearance and conversational abilities. Therefore, one approach to design advanced human-machine interfaces relies heavily on the so-called Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). An ECA is a virtual software agent that can process and produce speech, facial expressions, gestures and eye-gaze and, as a result, enables natural, multimodal, human-machine communication. Decades of research in psychology and related fields have shown that the visual channel is especially important in human-human-communication, with subtle changes in both appearance and motion altering how a conversational partner is perceived. In this work, we examine the effectiveness of modifying a virtual character's visual appearance using well-known stylization techniques in order to alter its perceived personality. We also explore the effect of these techniques on the recognizability, intensity and sincerity of the character's displayed emotions.