An Environment for Transforming Game Character Animations Based on Nationality and Profession Personality Stereotypes

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A vast body of literature has dealt with the challenges of creating the impression of human appearance and human-like motion in the animation of game characters. In this paper, we further refine these efforts by creating a flexible environment for animating game characters endowed with personality, which is a core descriptor of stable characteristics of human behavior and which is often expressed in human movement. We base our work on the Big Five personality traits, also known as OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism). Our environment incorporates a procedural mapping from OCEAN personality traits to movement modifiers that alter existing motions in ways compatible with a desired personality. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, we collected stereotypical personality profiles for 135 nationalities and 100 professions. We integrated these stereotypical personality expectations into an interactive interface in Unity3D. Users can linearly blend the nationality and profession OCEAN parameters and individually adjust them for specific characters or groups. The results are validated using Amazon Mechanical Turk pairwise judgments on character types based on movements.