Avatar expressions with Scherer's theory

Progress in computer graphics over the last decade has rendered the creation of believable anthropomorphic graphical avatars possible. Issues in rendering these animated graphical avatars believable and engaging during Human-Computer Interaction still remain. In this current work, we focus on the animation of avatar's facial expressions from a commercially a available generator software (Haptek, www.haptek.com). We created our animation basing on Scherer's theory of emotion because we want to be able to dynamically link internal emotion-like states to external emotional expressions. We have created five facial expression animations (happiness, disgust, sadness, fear and anger) and we discuss the specific steps and issues we followed as well as the evaluation results of a user study we conducted.