Emotional Avatars: Effect of Uncanniness in Identifying Emotions using Avatar Expressions

This work analyses the effect of uncanniness behaviour in identifying emotions from different humanoid avatar representations. Expressive avatars play a vital role in immersive environments. However, technical limitations in replicating subtle emotional cues using realtime expression conversion techniques create an uncanniness to the viewers. Hence, achieving the desired emotional awareness is arguable. Therefore, using an avatar representation resistant to uncanniness in systems sensitive to emotional changes is vital. Therefore, here we analyse the level of uncanniness noticed by people for different avatars exhibiting various emotions using expressive faces and the behavioural trends of people in catching emotion-related uncanniness.