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Motion capture is a well-established technology for capturing actors' movements and performances within the entertainment industry. Many actors, however, witness the poor acting conditions associated with such recordings. Instead of detailed sets, costumes and props, they are forced to play in empty spaces wearing tight suits. Often, their co-actors will be imaginary, replaced by placeholder props, or they would be out of scale with their virtual counterparts. These problems do not only affect acting, they also cause an abundance of laborious post-processing clean-up work. To solve these challenges, we propose using a combination of virtual reality and motion capture technology to bring differently proportioned virtual characters into a shared collaborative virtual environment. A within-subjects user study with trained actors showed that our proposed platform enhances their feelings of body ownership and immersion. This in turn changed actors' performances which narrowed the gap between virtual performances and final intended animations.

Embodied human communication encompasses both verbal (speech) and non-verbal information (e.g., gesture and head movements). Recent advances in machine learning have substantially improved the technologies for generating synthetic versions of both of these types of data: On the speech side, text-to-speech systems are now able to generate highly convincing, spontaneous-sounding speech using unscripted speech audio as the source material. On the motion side, probabilistic motion-generation methods can now synthesise vivid and lifelike speech-driven 3D gesticulation. In this paper, we put these two state-of-the-art technologies together in a coherent fashion for the first time. Concretely, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept system trained on a single-speaker audio and motion-capture dataset, that is able to generate both speech and full-body gestures together from text input. In contrast to previous approaches for joint speech-and-gesture generation, we generate full-body gestures from speech synthesis trained on recordings of spontaneous speech from the same person as the motion-capture data. We illustrate our results by visualising gesture spaces and text-speech-gesture alignments, and through a demonstration video at https://simonalexanderson.github.io/IVA2020 ., 3 pages, 2 figures, published at the ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) 2020

Text-to-speech and co-speech gesture synthesis have until now been treated as separate areas by two different research communities, and applications merely stack the two technologies using a simple system-level pipeline. This can lead to modeling inefficiencies and may introduce inconsistencies that limit the achievable naturalness. We propose to instead synthesize the two modalities in a single model, a new problem we call integrated speech and gesture synthesis (ISG). We also propose a set of models modified from state-of-the-art neural speech-synthesis engines to achieve this goal. We evaluate the models in three carefully-designed user studies, two of which evaluate the synthesized speech and gesture in isolation, plus a combined study that evaluates the models like they will be used in real-world applications -- speech and gesture presented together. The results show that participants rate one of the proposed integrated synthesis models as being as good as the state-of-the-art pipeline system we compare against, in all three tests. The model is able to achieve this with faster synthesis time and greatly reduced parameter count compared to the pipeline system, illustrating some of the potential benefits of treating speech and gesture synthesis together as a single, unified problem. Videos and code are available on our project page at https://swatsw.github.io/isg_icmi21/, Comment: 9 pages, accepted at ICMI 2021

Most of the motion re-targeting techniques are grounded on virtual character animation research, which means that they typically assume that the target embodiment has unconstrained joint angular velocities. However, because robots often do have such constraints, traditional re-targeting approaches can originate irregular delays in the robot motion. With the goal of ensuring synchronization between verbal and nonverbal behavior, this paper proposes an optimization framework for processing re-targeted motion sequences that addresses constraints such as joint angle and angular velocities. The proposed framework was evaluated on a humanoid robot using both objective and subjective metrics. While the analysis of the joint motion trajectories provides evidence that our framework successfully performs the desired modifications to ensure verbal and nonverbal behavior synchronization, results from a perceptual study showed that participants found the robot motion generated by our method more natural, elegant and lifelike than a control condition.

This paper presents a unique dataset consisting of 20 recordings of the same musical piece, conducted with 4 different musical intentions in mind. The upper body and baton motion of a professional conductor was recorded, as well as the sound of each instrument in a professional string quartet following the conductor. The dataset is made available for benchmarking of motion recognition algorithms. An HMM-based emotion intent classification method is trained with subsets of the data, and classification of other subsets of the data show firstly that the motion of the baton communicates energetic intention to a high degree, secondly, that the conductor’s torso, head and other arm conveys calm intention to a high degree, and thirdly, that positive vs negative sentiments are communicated to a high degree through other channels than the body and baton motion – most probably, through facial expression and muscle tension conveyed through articulated hand and finger motion. The long-term goal of this work is to develop a computer model of the entire conductor-orchestra communication pro- cess; the studies presented here indicate that computer modeling of the conductor-orchestra communication is feasible. QC 20170616

Unlike their human counterparts, artificial agents such as robots and game characters may be deployed with a large variety of face and body configurations. Some have articulated bodies but lack facial features, and others may be talking heads ending at the neck. Generally, they have many fewer degrees of freedom than humans through which they must express themselves, and there will inevitably be a filtering effect when mapping human motion onto the agent. In this article, we investigate filtering effects on three types of embodiments: (a) an agent with a body but no facial features, (b) an agent with a head only, and (c) an agent with a body and a face. We performed a full performance capture of a mime actor enacting short interactions varying the non-verbal expression along five dimensions (e.g., level of frustration and level of certainty) for each of the three embodiments. We performed a crowd-sourced evaluation experiment comparing the video of the actor to the video of an animated robot for the different embodiments and dimensions. Our findings suggest that the face is especially important to pinpoint emotional reactions but is also most volatile to filtering effects. The body motion, on the other hand, had more diverse interpretations but tended to preserve the interpretation after mapping and thus proved to be more resilient to filtering. QC 20171127

Passive optical motion capture is one of the predominant technologies for capturing high fidelity human motion, and is a workhorse in a large number of areas such as bio-mechanics, film and video games. While most state-of-the-art systems can automatically identify and track markers on the larger parts of the human body, the markers attached to the fingers and face provide unique challenges and usually require extensive manual cleanup. In this work we present a robust online method for identification and tracking of passive motion capture markers attached to non-rigid structures. The method is especially suited for large capture volumes and sparse marker sets. Once trained, our system can automatically initialize and track the markers, and the subject may exit and enter the capture volume at will. By using multiple assignment hypotheses and soft decisions, it can robustly recover from a difficult situation with many simultaneous occlusions and false observations (ghost markers). In three experiments, we evaluate the method for labeling a variety of marker configurations for finger and facial capture. We also compare the results with two of the most widely used motion capture platforms: Motion Analysis Cortex and Vicon Blade. The results show that our method is better at attaining correct marker labels and is especially beneficial for real-time applications. QC 20171127

Speech and gesture co-occur in spontaneous dialogue in a highly complex fashion. There is a large variability in the motion that people exhibit during a dialogue, and different kinds of motion occur during different states of the interaction. A wide range of multimodal interface applications, for example in the fields of virtual agents or social robots, can be envisioned where it is important to be able to automatically identify gestures that carry information and discriminate them from other types of motion. While it is easy for a human to distinguish and segment manual gestures from a flow of multimodal information, the same task is not trivial to perform for a machine. In this paper we present a method to automatically segment and label gestural units from a stream of 3D motion capture data.The gestural flow is modeled with a 2-level Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model (HHMM) where the sub-states correspond to gesture phases. The model is trained based on labels of complete gesture units and self-adaptive manipulators. The model is tested and validated on two datasets differing in genre and in method of capturing motion, and outperforms a state-of-the-art SVM classifier on a publicly available dataset.

In order to ensure smooth turn-taking between conversational participants, interlocutors must have ways of providing information to one another about whether they have finished speaking or intend t ...