ORCID
- Cathy Ennis: 0000-0002-1274-5347
Abstract
The capacity to create realistic virtual humans has progressed significantly, and such characters can be found in many applications across entertainment, education and health. As an essential element of interactive virtual humans, speech-driven 3D gesture generation still depends heavily on perceptual evaluation, yet studies often vary avatar appearance and facial presentation when judging the generated motions. Prior work suggests these visual choices can bias motion judgments, but controlled evidence remains limited. We address this gap with controlled evaluations of co-speech gestures across motion sources, spanning seven representative avatar renderings used in contemporary research and application pipelines. Our results show that avatar and face presentation systematically shift perceptual judgments, and we provide recommendations for benchmarking gesture synthesis as well as for deploying virtual humans in human-facing applications.
DOI Link
Publication Date
2026-07-19
Event
Conference Papers, SIGGRAPH 2026
Publication Title
Proceedings - SIGGRAPH 2026 Conference Papers
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
ISBN
9798400725548
Deposit Date
2026-09-04
Funding
This work was conducted with the financial support of the Research Ireland Centre for Research Training in Digitally-Enhanced Reality (d-real) under Grant No. 18/CRT/6224.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Additional Links
Recommended Citation
Du, Haoyang; Xu, Yinghan; Dingliana, John; Keegan, Brian; McDonnell, Rachel; and Ennis, Cathy, "Reality Check: How Avatar and Face Representation Affect the Perceptual Evaluation of Synthesized Gestures" (2026). Research Outputs: 2025-Present. 5.
https://arrow.tudublin.ie/aaschmedro/5