Does render style affect perception of personality in virtual humans?

Delivering appealing virtual characters conveying personality is becoming extremely important in the entertainment industry and beyond. A theory called the 'Uncanny Valley' has been used to describe the phenomenon that the appearance of a virtual character can contribute to negative/positive audience reactions to that character [Mori 1970]. Since the style used to render a character strongly changes the appearance, we investigate whether a difference in render style can indirectly influence audience reaction, which we measure based on perception of personality. Based on psychology research, we first scripted original character dialogues in order to convey a range of ten typical personality types. Then, a professional actor was recruited to act out these dialogues, while his face and body motion and audio were recorded. The performances were mapped onto a virtual character rendered in two styles that differ in appearance: an appealing cartoon style and unappealing ill style (Figure 1). In our experiment, participants were asked questions about the character's personality in order for us to test if the difference in render style causes differences in personality perception. Our results found an indirect effect of render style where the cartoon style was rated as having a more agreeable personality than the ill style. This result has implications for developers interested in creating appealing virtual humans, avoiding the 'Uncanny Valley' phenomenon.