Integration and Evaluation of Prototypical Culture-related Differences

The integration of culture into the behavioral models of virtual characters requires knowledge from very different disciplines such as sociology and computer science. If culture-related behavioral differences are integrated into a virtual character system, users do not necessarily understand the intent of such a system. In this paper, we present a prototype that tries to integrate the masculinity dimension of culture with prototypical differences in verbal and nonverbal behavior. In a preliminary evaluation study, we investigated how these differences are judged by human observers with different cultural backgrounds.