CHAPTER 11
Human and Virtual Agent
Expressive Gesture Quality
Analysis and Synthesis
Radoslaw Niewiadomski, Maurizio Mancini
and Stefano Piana
1. Introduction
Nonverbal communication is an essential element of human-
human communication, equally important as the verbal message. It
consists of bodily nonverbal signals, including facial expressions, hand/
arm gestures, posture shifts, and so on (Argyle, 1998). In particular,
the communicative meaning of gestures usually depends on two
components: shape and expressive quality. While the role of the former,
for instance the configurations of the hand in time, is well known
(McNeill, 1996), studies about the latter, i.e., how a particular mental
intention is communicated through a gesture’s expressive ...