Validation of Interpersonal Stances Expressed by Virtual Suspect Characters in a Police Interview Setting

This work is a follow-up of the project by Michel Lamore et al. who has made a 3D animation of a suspect character for the police interview game PIENTER. In the Research Topics, behavioral and expressive features that characterize the perceived stances when acted out by human actors have been identified. Those features were used to create animation of four categories of interpersonal stances for the virtual suspects. In this project, graphical 3D virtual suspects were created that act out four attitudes as defined in Leary’s theory of interpersonal stance: dominant, submissive, friendly and hostile. The system is capable of generating body posture and facial expression in real-time. An experiment was carried out to evaluate if human judges recognize the intended stances acted out by the virtual suspect.