Stereotypes, Language & Virtual Humans

A tall, round, and heavy-jawed man. A short, curvy, and fit woman. Did you create an image of these people in your head? We investigated the relationship between language and metric body shape using state-of-the-art body models. Our results show that language encodes body metrics, allowing body shape reconstruction with an error below 1cm. Using our framework, we can reconstruct accurate 3D body shape from pictures and text descriptions of people.
Now, a selfish man, a friendly woman, a successful engineer. Did you manage to picture these people? We are currently modeling and visualizing how people attribute traits to others based on their body shape, in order to bring awareness to our implicit biases, considering also how our individual differences may affect these attributions.