Abstract
We present the methods that were used in capturing a library of human movements for use in computer animated displays of human movement. The library is an attempt to systematically tap into and represent the wide range of person properties, such as identity, gender and emotion that is available in a person's movements and it has been made available online at http://paco.psy.gla.ac.uk/. The movements from a total of 30 non-professional actors (15 female) were captured while they performed walking, knocking, lifting and throwing actions as well as their combination in angry, happy, neutral and sad affective styles. From the raw motion capture data, a library of 4080 movements were obtained using techniques based on Character Studio (plug-ins for 3D Studio Max, AutoDesk Inc.), Matlab (The Mathworks) or a combination of these two. For the knocking, lifting and throwing actions 10 repetitions of the simple action unit were obtained for each affect, and for the other actions two longer movement recordings were obtained for each affect. We discuss the potential use of the library for computational and behavioural analyses of movement variability, human character animation and how gender, emotion and identity are encoded and decoded from human movement.