Using Individual Light Rigs to Control the Perception of a Virtual Character’s Personality

Abstract. We investigate how lighting can be used to influence how the personality of virtual characters is perceived. We propose a character-centric lighting system composed of three dynamic lights that can be configured using an interactive editor. To study the effect of character-centric lighting on observers, we created four lighting configurations derived from the photography and film literature. A user study with 32 subjects shows that the lighting setups do influence the perception of the characters ' personality. We found lighting effects with regard to the perception of dominance. Moreover, we found that the personality perception of female characters seems to change more easily than for male characters