Video game developers continuously increase the degree of details and realism in games to create more human-like characters. But increasing the human-likeness becomes a problem in regard to the Uncanny Valley phenomenon that predicts negative feelings of people towards artificial entities.

We developed an avatar creation system to examine preferences towards parametrized faces and explore in regard to the Uncanny Valley phenomenon how people design faces that they like or reject. Based on the 3D model of the Caucasian average face, 420 participants generate 1341 faces of positively and negatively associated concepts of both gender.

The results show that some characteristics associated with the Uncanny Valley are used to create villains or repulsive faces. Heroic faces get attractive features but are rarely and little stylized. A voluntarily designed face is very similar to the heroine. This indicates that there is a tendency of users to design feminine and attractive but still credible faces.

The online avatar generator faceMaker.

Read the paper here.

@inproceedings{Schwind2015a,

title = {Determining the Characteristics of Preferred Virtual Faces Using an Avatar Generator},

author = {Valentin Schwind and Katrin Wolf and Niels Henze and Oliver Korn},

url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2793116\&CFID=551380884\&CFTOKEN=54644610},

doi = {10.1145/2793107.2793116},

isbn = {978-1-4503-3466-2},

year  = {2015},

date = {2015-10-08},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY)},

volume = {2},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}