Gaze is a fundamental component of communicatively effective character animation. In animated film and other non-interactive media, a character’s gaze can capture the viewer’s attention and convey the character’s personality and intent, while interactive virtual characters can use gaze cues to enhance their social interactions with users. In all these contexts, the character’s nonverbal attending behavior can be realized as a sequence of directed gaze shifts—coordinated movements of the eyes, head, torso, and the whole body toward targets in the scene. This dissertation introduces new methods for synthesis of directed gaze shifts for animated characters. The methods can synthesize a wide range of gaze movements—from subtle saccades and glances, to whole-body turns. Experiments are presented showing how virtual agents can use these movements as effective social signals in interactions with humans. Furthermore, an approach is introduced for gaze animation authoring for non-interactive scenarios, which uses directed gaze shifts as authoring primitives. It is empirically demonstrated that the new approach reduces the cost of animation authoring and improves its scalability.

@PhdThesis{Pej16,
  author       = "Pejsa, Tomislav",
  title        = "Effective Directed Gaze for Character Animation",
  school       = "University of Wisconsin-Madison",
  year         = "2016",
  url          = "http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2016/Pej16"
}