Abstract
Using styles derived from existing popular character designs, we present a novel automatic stylization technique for body shape and colour information based on a statistical 3D model of human bodies. We investigate whether such stylized body shapes result in increased perceived appeal with two different experiments: One focuses on body shape alone, the other investigates the additional role of surface colour and lighting. Our results consistently show that the most appealing avatar is a partially stylized one. Importantly, avatars with high stylization or no stylization at all were rated to have the least appeal. The inclusion of colour information and improvements to render quality had no significant effect on the overall perceived appeal of the avatars, and we observe that the body shape primarily drives the change in appeal ratings. For body scans with colour information, we found that a partially stylized avatar was perceived as most appealing.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Chris Ferguson, Joe Smallwood, Anna Wellerdiek, Alex Holmes and Michael Geuss as well as all the participants of our experiments.
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Fleming, R., Mohler, B.J., Romero, J., Black, M.J., Breidt, M. (2017). Appealing Avatars from 3D Body Scans: Perceptual Effects of Stylization. In: Braz, J., et al. Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications. VISIGRAPP 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 693. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64870-5_9
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