43-Issue 8

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Reactive Gaze during Locomotion in Natural Environments
(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2024) Melgaré, Julia K.; Rohmer, Damien; Musse, Soraia R.; Cani, Marie-Paule; Skouras, Melina; Wang, He
Animating gaze behavior is crucial for creating believable virtual characters, providing insights into their perception and interaction with the environment. In this paper, we present an efficient yet natural-looking gaze animation model applicable to real-time walking characters exploring natural environments. We address the challenge of dynamic gaze adaptation by combining findings from neuroscience with a data-driven saliency model. Specifically, our model determines gaze focus by considering the character's locomotion, environment stimuli, and terrain conditions. Our model is compatible with both automatic navigation through pre-defined character trajectories and user-guided interactive locomotion, and can be configured according to the desired degree of visual exploration of the environment. Our perceptual evaluation shows that our solution significantly improves the state-of-the-art saliency-based gaze animation with respect to the character's apparent awareness of the environment, the naturalness of the motion, and the elements to which it pays attention.