Virtual humans (VH) have been used in Computer Graphics (CG) for many years, and perception studies have been applied to understand how people perceive them. Some studies have already examined how realism impacts the comfort of viewers. In some cases, the user's comfort is related to human identification. For example, people from a specific group may look positively at others from the same group. Gender is one of those characteristics that have in-group advantages. For example, in terms of VHs, studies have shown that female humans are more likely to recognize emotions in female VHs than in male VHs. However, there are many other variables that can impact the user perception. To aid this discussion, we conducted a study on how people perceive comfort and realism in relation to interactive VHs with different genders and expressing negative, neutral, or positive emotions in groups. We created a virtual environment for participants to interact with groups of VHs, which are interactive and should evolve in real-time, using a popular game engine. To animate the characters, we opted for cartoon figures that are animated by tracking the facial expressions of actors, using available game engine platforms to conduct the driven animation. Our results indicate that the emotion of the VH group impacts both comfort and realism perception, even by using simple cartoon characters in an interactive environment. Furthermore, the findings suggest that individuals reported feeling better with a positive emotion compared to a negative emotion, and that negative emotion recognition is impacted by the gender of the VHs group. Additionally, although we used simple characters, the results are consistent with the perception obtained when analysing realistic the state-of-the-art virtual humans, which positive emotions tend to be more correctly recognized than negative ones.

翻译：虚拟人（VH）在计算机图形学（CG）中已应用多年，感知研究则用于理解人们如何感知它们。已有研究探讨了真实感如何影响观看者的舒适度。在某些情况下，用户的舒适度与人类身份认同相关。例如，特定群体的人可能对同群体成员持积极看法。性别便是具有群体内优势的特征之一。以虚拟人为例，研究表明女性人类更易识别女性虚拟人的情绪而非男性虚拟人。然而，影响用户感知的变量众多。为推进此讨论，我们开展了一项研究，探究人们如何感知具有不同性别、在群体中表达消极、中性或积极情绪的交互式虚拟人所带来的舒适度与真实感。我们使用流行游戏引擎创建了虚拟环境，供参与者与虚拟人群体互动，这些虚拟人具备交互性并应实时演化。为驱动角色动画，我们选用卡通形象，通过追踪演员面部表情进行驱动，利用现有游戏引擎平台实现动画驱动。研究结果表明，即使在交互环境中使用简易卡通角色，虚拟人群体的情绪仍会同时影响舒适度与真实感感知。此外，研究发现个体报告在积极情绪环境中感受优于消极情绪环境，且消极情绪识别受虚拟人群体性别影响。值得注意的是，尽管使用简易角色，实验结果与现有最逼真虚拟人的分析感知一致：积极情绪往往比消极情绪更易被准确识别。