Cultural Dialects of Real and Synthetic Emotional Facial Expressions

In this paper we discuss the aspects of designing facial expressions for Virtual Humans with a specific culture. First we explore the notion of cultures and its relevance for applications with a Virtual Human. Then we give a general scheme of designing emotional facial expressions, and identify the stages where a human is involved, either as a real person with some specific role, or as a VH displaying facial expressions. We discuss how the display and emotional meaning of facial expressions may be measured in objective ways, and how the culture of displayers and judges may influence the process of analyzing human facial expressions and evaluating synthesized ones. We review psychological experiments on cross-cultural perception of emotional facial expressions. By identifying the culturally critical issues of data collection and interpretation with both real and virtual humans, we aim at providing a methodological reference and inspiration for further research.