The PAD (pleasure / arousal / dominance) scale by Mehrabian et al provides a nice simple three axis model for classifying all sorts of emotional states, including Anxiety, Depression, Panic, Empathy, Achievement, Extroversion, Arousal Seeking, Loneliness, Emotional Stability, Dependency, Aggressiveness, and Fidgeting.
In my recent post about using simple face-only characters to create a story, I used only two of these three dimensions: eyebrows up/down for varying dominance, and mouth frown/smile for varying pleasure. After seeing a lecture today by Marc Cavazza in which he discussed the PAD scale, I realized that it’s easy to add the third (arousal) axis, simply by changing the shape of the eyes.
So I’ve created another version of this program in which I replaced the winking and blinking with eye shapes that evoke different levels of arousal: interested→neutral→bored. I also added a time-line! You can play with the new version by clicking on the image below:
We are having fun with this program 🙂
Just by looking at this simple expression you post here as an example, one can come up with scenarios like “the girl (red) hasn’t quite forgiven her boyfriend (blue) for whatever reason, and he is trying to get back on her good side 🙂
I would love to see what you make with it! I should add a facility to allow you to save your story to a server so other people can play it back, yes?