Touch Perception and Emotional Appraisal for a Virtual Agent

Abstract. Building virtual agents that are able to perceive and appraise touch increase the lifelikeness and interaction possibilities in human com-puter interaction. In this paper we introduce work on how a sense of touch was realized for the virtual human Max and how he can emotionally react to it by appraising the different kinds of tactile sensation. 1 Introduction and Related Work Virtual agents have found various attention in affective computing. For instance, agents have been built that can express emotions in their faces, e.g. [4] and voices, e.g. [3]. Also physical agents were developed that can perceive touch and are able to respond to tactile sensations in different ways, e.g. [9] and [10]. An interesting