Evaluating Idle Animation Believability: a User Perspective
For game and VR developers, this work reduces the cost and complexity of creating believable idle animations by showing that acted performances are perceived as real.
The paper investigates whether users can distinguish between acted and genuine idle animations, finding that they cannot, which simplifies the recording process for idle animation datasets. The authors also release ReActIdle, a 3D dataset of real and acted idle motions.
Animating realistic avatars requires using high quality animations for every possible state the avatar can be in. This includes actions like walking or running, but also subtle movements that convey emotions and personality. Idle animations, such as standing, breathing or looking around, are crucial for realism and believability. In games and virtual applications, these are often handcrafted or recorded with actors, but this is costly. Furthermore, recording realistic idle animations can be very complex, because the actor must not know they are being recorded in order to make genuine movements. For this reasons idle animation datasets are not widely available. Nevertheless, this paper concludes that both acted and genuine idle animations are perceived as real, and that users are not able to distinguish between them. It also states that handmade and recorded idle animations are perceived differently. These two conclusions mean that recording idle animations should be easier than it is thought to be, meaning that actors can be specifically told to act the movements, significantly simplifying the recording process. These conclusions should help future efforts to record idle animation datasets. Finally, we also publish ReActIdle, a 3 dimensional idle animation dataset containing both real and acted idle motions.