Association of Game Events with Facial Animations of Computer-Controlled Virtual Characters Based on Probabilistic Human Reaction Modeling

Abstract

Computer-controlled virtual characters are essential parts of most virtual environments and especially computer games. Interaction between these virtual agents and human players has a direct impact on the believability of and immersion in the application. The facial animations of these characters are a key part of these interactions. The player expects the elements of the virtual world to act in a similar manner to the real world. For example, in a board game, if the human player wins, he/she would expect the computer-controlled character to be sad. However, the reactions, more specifically, the facial expressions of virtual characters in most games are not linked with the game events. Instead, they have pre-programmed or random behaviors without any understanding of what is really happening in the game. In this paper, we propose a virtual character facial expression probabilistic decision model that will determine when various facial animations should be played. The model was developed by studying the facial expressions of human players while playing a computer videogame that was also developed as part of this research. The model is represented in the form of trees with 15 extracted game events as roots and 10 associated animations of facial expressions with their corresponding probability of occurrence. Results indicated that only 1 out of 15 game events had a probability of producing an unexpected facial expression. It was found that the “win, lose, tie” game events have more dominant associations with the facial expressions than the rest of game events, followed by “surprise” game events that occurred rarely, and finally, the “damage dealing” events.

Keywords

• facial animations
• non playable character (NPC) reaction modeling
• NPC design
• game design
• virtual character probabilistic behavior modeling