Body language

Body language is a type of communication in which physical behaviors, as opposed to words, are used to express or convey information. Such behavior includes facial expressions, body posture, gestures, eye movement, touch and the use of space. The term body language is usually applied in regard to people but may also be applied to animals. The study of body language is also known as kinesics. Although body language is an important part of communication, most of it happens without conscious awareness. Body language differs from sign language, which are languages with complex grammar systems and exhibiting the fundamental properties considered to exist in all true languages. Body language, on the other hand, does not have a grammar system and must be interpreted broadly, instead of having an absolute meaning corresponding with a certain movement. It is, technically, not a language. Within a society, consensus exists regarding the accepted understandings and interpretations of specific

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To train painting we must, first and foremost, train our gaze and our eyes to select, focus, caress, become inflamed. Learning to draw or paint means learning to see, to discover the physical porosity of the world, to engage with our own bodies, as well as the body of the matter we're working with.

This course will offer students a broad but hands-on introduction to technologies of human self-organization.

This course focuses on goal-directed design and interaction design, two subjects treated in depth in the Cooper book (see reference below). To practice these two methods, we propose a design challenge, which is further divided into mini-projects evenly spaced throughout the semester.

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Translating Head Motion into Attention - Towards Processing of Student’s Body-Language

Pierre Dillenbourg, Lukasz Kidzinski, Mirko Raca

Evidence has shown that student's attention is a crucial factor for engagement and learning gain. Although it can be accurately assessed ad-hoc by an experienced teacher, continuous contact with all students in a large class is difficult to maintain and requires training for novice practitioners. We continue our previous work on investigating unobtrusive measures of body-language in order to predict student's attention during the class, and provide teachers with a support system to help them to "scale-up" to a large class. Our work here is focused on head-motion, by which we aim to mimic large-scale gaze tracking. By using new computer vision techniques we are able to extract head poses of all students in the video-stream from the class. After defining several measures about head motion, we checked their significance and attempted to demonstrate their value by fitting a mixture model and training support vector machines (SVM) classifiers. We show that drops in attention are reflected in a decreased intensity of head movement. We were also able to reach 65.72% correct classifications of student attention on a 3-point scale.

2015

An Event-Based Architecture to Manage Virtual Human Non-Verbal Communication in 3D Chatting Environment

Junghyun Ahn, Ronan Boulic, David Garcia, Stéphane Gobron, Quentin Silvestre, Daniel Thalmann

Non-verbal communication (NVC) makes up about two-thirds of all communication between two people or between one speaker and a group of listeners. However, this fundamental aspect of communicating is mostly omitted in 3D social forums or virtual world oriented games. This paper proposes an answer by presenting a multi-user 3D-chatting system enriched with NVC relative to motion. This event-based architecture tries to recreate a context by extracting emotional cues from dialogs and derives virtual human potential body expressions from that event triggered context model. We structure the paper by expounding the system architecture enabling the modeling NVC in a multi-user 3D-chatting environment. There, we present the transition from dialog-based emotional cues to body language, and the management of NVC events in the context of a virtual reality client-server system. Finally, we illustrate the results with graphical scenes and a statistical analysis representing the increase of events due to NVC.

Springer Berlin Heidelberg2012

Sleepers’ lag - study on motion and attention

Pierre Dillenbourg, Mirko Raca, Roland John Tormey

Human body-language is one of the richest and most obscure sources of information in inter-personal communication which we aim to re-introduce into the classroom’s ecosystem. In this paper we present our observations of student-to-student influence and measurements. We show parallels with previous theories and formulate a new concept for measuring the level of attention based on synchronization of student actions. We observed that the students with lower levels of attention are slower to react then focused students, a phenomenon we named “sleepers’ lag”.

ACM2014

Nonverbal communication

Nonverbal communication (NVC) is the transmission of messages or signals through a nonverbal platform such as eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, posture, use of objects and body language. I

Facial expression

A facial expression is one or more motions or positions of the muscles beneath the skin of the face. According to one set of controversial theories, these movements convey the emotional state of an i

Gesture

A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication or non-vocal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages, either in place of, or in conjunction with, speech. Gesture

This course will offer students a broad but hands-on introduction to technologies of human self-organization.