Reality Check: How Avatar and Face Representation Affect the Perceptual Evaluation of Synthesized Gestures

Fuente: arXiv

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors:	Du, Haoyang, Xu, Yinghan, Dingliana, John, Keegan, Brian, McDonnell, Rachel, Ennis, Cathy
Format:	Preprint
Published:	2026
Subjects:	Graphics Human-Computer Interaction
Online Access:	Acceder al recurso
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_version_	1866915997279059968
author	Du, Haoyang Xu, Yinghan Dingliana, John Keegan, Brian McDonnell, Rachel Ennis, Cathy
author_facet	Du, Haoyang Xu, Yinghan Dingliana, John Keegan, Brian McDonnell, Rachel Ennis, Cathy
contents	The capacity to create realistic virtual humans has progressed significantly, and such characters can be found in many applications across entertainment, education and health. As an essential element of interactive virtual humans, speech-driven 3D gesture generation still depends heavily on perceptual evaluation, yet studies often vary avatar appearance and facial presentation when judging the generated motions. Prior work suggests these visual choices can bias motion judgments, but controlled evidence remains limited. We address this gap with controlled evaluations of co-speech gestures across motion sources, spanning seven representative avatar renderings used in contemporary research and application pipelines. Our results show that avatar and face presentation systematically shift perceptual judgments, and we provide recommendations for benchmarking gesture synthesis as well as for deploying virtual humans in human-facing applications.
format	Preprint
id	arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06063
institution	arXiv
publishDate	2026
record_format	arxiv
spellingShingle	Reality Check: How Avatar and Face Representation Affect the Perceptual Evaluation of Synthesized Gestures Du, Haoyang Xu, Yinghan Dingliana, John Keegan, Brian McDonnell, Rachel Ennis, Cathy Graphics Human-Computer Interaction The capacity to create realistic virtual humans has progressed significantly, and such characters can be found in many applications across entertainment, education and health. As an essential element of interactive virtual humans, speech-driven 3D gesture generation still depends heavily on perceptual evaluation, yet studies often vary avatar appearance and facial presentation when judging the generated motions. Prior work suggests these visual choices can bias motion judgments, but controlled evidence remains limited. We address this gap with controlled evaluations of co-speech gestures across motion sources, spanning seven representative avatar renderings used in contemporary research and application pipelines. Our results show that avatar and face presentation systematically shift perceptual judgments, and we provide recommendations for benchmarking gesture synthesis as well as for deploying virtual humans in human-facing applications.
title	Reality Check: How Avatar and Face Representation Affect the Perceptual Evaluation of Synthesized Gestures
topic	Graphics Human-Computer Interaction
url	https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06063