Development of a System for Analyzing Hand-Raising Communication by Using a VR Headset to Synthesize Human-CG Character Interaction

Embodied Body motions and actions play an important role in human communication. Hand raising is one of the typical body motions that people have been encouraged to performed since their childhoods, but almost no studies address it from the viewpoint of human–computer interaction. By focusing on its importance, the authors have been developed hand-raising robots and Computer Graphics characters to analyze the communication effect. In this study, we developed an analyzing system using a Virtual Reality (VR) headset that can enable users to immerse themselves into CG. We performed an evaluation experiment to analyze the effects of the number of CG characters who raised their hands and the height of the hand raising. The scene in which all CG characters raised their hands to a low point and the scene in which one-third of the CG characters raised their hands to a high point were rated equally. This means that the effect of the number of CG characters in VR was larger than in front of a large screen. As a result, the participants’ impression of hand-raising communication changed.