Personal space-based simulation of non-verbal communications

The analysis of the non-verbal communication between people via the management of their personal spaces (PS) gives an idea on the nature of their relationship. In this paper we propose a mathematical model for the concept of personal space and demonstrate its application in simulating the non-verbal communication between agents in virtual worlds and also in human–computer interaction. Persons within a group tend to maintain the distances between each other within a certain range that maximizes their degree of comfort. These distances reflect the type of their relationship. Changes in these distances reflect the evolution over time of their relationship. Human-like autonomous virtual agents should be also equipped with such capability to simulate natural interactions in virtual worlds. We model the space around a person as a comfort function that reflects at each point in the space the importance of that location to the person. A person’s comfort function depends on (1) his relation with other people in the space, (2) his distance, and (3) his face orientation with respect to other people. At each time step, people aim at maximizing their comfort function and therefore move and rotate in the direction of the steepest ascent of its gradient. We demonstrate the efficiency of this model in: (1) simulating the non-verbal communication between human-like virtual agents in virtual worlds, and (2) simulating the non-verbal communication between agents and real humans which has applications in augmented reality and in virtual worlds that are populated with human-controlled avatars.

Research highlights
► A mathematical model of the personal space that depends on distances and facial orientations.
► Modeling the non-verbal communication between virtual agents.
► Personal space-based human virtual agent interaction.