Facial Expressions of Appraisals Displayed by a Virtual Storyteller for Children

In this paper, we present a framework for an expressive virtual storyteller for children. Our virtual storyteller displays facial expressions of appraisals related to story events. The facial expressions are animated jointly with deictic gestures towards graphical elements representing story events. We describe a preliminary study that we conducted with 23 children. We discuss the impact of facial expressions of appraisals on children’s memorization of story events, their perception of characters’ appraisals, their subjective perception of the virtual storyteller and more generally how emotion combines with joint attention.