Modelling Emotional Behaviour in Virtual Crowds through Expressive Body Movements and Emotion Contagion

Virtual crowds are gaining more relevance in computer graphics. Research in this area has been of great interest for both industrial and scientific activities related with entertainment and virtual simulation, and nowadays it is possible to generate virtual crowds with believable and complex behaviour. However, expression of emotion and social behaviour for multiple characters is a research area that still remains to be further investigated. Particularly, emotional awareness and emotion contagion between artificial agents is gaining more interest in recent years. In this paper we present a work-in-progress that deals with the current state-of-the-art of emotional virtual crowds, and we present an overview of a computational model capable of generating virtual crowds with body emotional behaviour and emotion contagion. Also, we present a brief overview of a perceptual study in relation to the perception of social behaviour in virtual crowds. Our work seeks to shed more light into this area of computer graphics and to find new paths of research for future work.