Undertaken in collaboration with the Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory International, Kyoto, Japan

The long-range purpose of this work is to use human reactions to video presentation of human and non-human audiovisual behaviour to assess the behavioural and communicative plausibility of virtual devices whose appearance and control parameters can be varied between realistic norms for humans and non-human physical devices such as a robot head or animated toaster. This requires animation software that can be driven by both measured and exaggerated physical and behavioural data.

Physical measurements of the structure and motion of humans and a robot device will be implemented in a computer animation program that generates audiovisual output. The resulting simulations may be humanoid or not and will be used for psychometric and aesthetic evaluation by human subjects

As an outcome of this research, software for producing animated audiovisual sequences of human and non-human heads to be used in preliminary psychometric and aesthetic evaluations will be developed.