Attractiveness and Confidence in Walking Style of Male and Female Virtual Characters

Animated virtual characters are essential to many applications. Little is known so far about biological and personality inferences made from a virtual character’s body shape and motion. Here, we investigated how sex-specific differences in walking style relate to the perceived attractiveness and confidence of male and female virtual characters. The characters were generated by reconstructing body shape and walking motion from optical motion capture data. The results suggest that sexual dimorphism in walking style plays a different role in attributing biological and personality traits to male and female virtual characters. This finding has important implications for virtual character animation.