Fitting the Style: The Semantic Space for Emotions on Stylized Faces.

It has been widely proven among several research disciplines that the information conveyed through the visual channel can be critical for communication. Altering either the motion or the appearance of our interlocutor can change the opinion we form about them or lead us to drastically different conclusions on what is being communicated. In this paper, we explore the influence of altering the visual appearance of a virtual 3D face model through several different stylization techniques on the perception of dynamic conversational facial expressions. We propose the use of a semantic-differential task to recover the underlying semantic/cognitive space for the expressions and their corresponding shifts due to the application of the different styles. Given the appropriate amount of stimuli, we consider this technique well fitted to provide a mapping between meaning of emotions and spectrum of rendering parameters. Our results show that the different techniques are capable to alter the perception of the expressions making them, for example, more intense or ephemeral in a rather consistent manner.