About the Moose’s eye contact. I’ve read that there is an 80-20 rule for friendly eye gaze. Do direct eye contact looking directly at user 80% of the time, and look away 20% of the time. However that statistic comes from “Flirting” analysis.
Eye contact duration must be a minimum of 4.5 seconds. Any less indicates dis-interest. An 8.2 second eye contact by a man (to a woman) is optimum, (in a flirting context).
However, the above refers to gaze while at some distance, (or listening) When you do the talking, apparently eye contact should only be 40 to 50% of the time.
To back that up, a different reference (Argyle 1993) says 75% eye-gaze while listening, but only 40% while talking.
Eye blinking should be approximately every 4 seconds, to indicate relaxed friendly emotional state. However, people blink faster while talking, and slower while listening.
Also, I’ve read about the “eyebrow flip”, which is a very quick raise of the eyebrows, used as a non-verbal acknowledgement of friendship. It can be used when the Moose first appears, before speaking starts. (Sometimes, but not every time.) If the moose isn’t looking directly at the user when he first appears, then wait until the eyes look at the user before giving an eyebrow flip.
OK, now I just read about how Lady Diana would look with her head down and eyes looking up, which helped people feel warmly towards her. Maybe I can try that sometimes.
This article about Human-agent eye gaze is good, although a lot of it takes advantage of actually tracking where the user is looking, which the Moose can’t do, (yet).
The above article suggests that the initial eye-contact should be followed by a downward gaze and slight smile. It further suggests that after subsequent eye-contact periods, the emotional state should become more joyful, perhaps with bigger smiles and higher eyebrows. Later, during eye contact phase, use 1/3 probabilities of “eyebrow flash”, “a pout”, a raise of an upper eyelid, or a smile.
Yet another article, I’ll check later because it mentions references that describe algorithms for eye movements. citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1.14.9516[1].pdf
You know, however nicely the eye behavior is crafted and coded, some people will want more eye contact, and other want less. I should make a Control to let people choose between 3 settings for this.. located at the same place where the controls will be to tweak the direction of eye-gaze.
