# EVA: Generating Emotional Behavior of Virtual Agents using Expressive Features of Gait and Gaze

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.02102 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02102/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Speech2AffectiveGestures: Synthesizing Co-Speech Gestures with Generative Adversarial Affective Expression Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00262/) (2021)
- [Pose2Gaze: Eye-body Coordination during Daily Activities for Gaze Prediction from Full-body Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12042/) (2023)
- [MSA-GCN:Multiscale Adaptive Graph Convolution Network for Gait Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08988/) (2022)
- [The Importance of Multimodal Emotion Conditioning and Affect Consistency for Embodied Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15311/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a novel, real-time algorithm, EVA, for generating virtual agents with various perceived emotions. Our approach is based on using Expressive Features of gaze and gait to convey emotions corresponding to happy, sad, angry, or neutral. We precompute a data-driven mapping between gaits and their perceived emotions. EVA uses this gait emotion association at runtime to generate appropriate walking styles in terms of gaits and gaze. Using the EVA algorithm, we can simulate gaits and gazing behaviors of hundreds of virtual agents in real-time with known emotional characteristics. We have evaluated the benefits in different multi-agent VR simulation environments. Our studies suggest that the use of expressive features corresponding to gait and gaze can considerably increase the sense of presence in scenarios with multiple virtual agents.