As simple as it gets...

Woody Welcome to APEx, a novel research tool for nonverbal behavior:

 

Abstract


Source: Wikipedia

APEx is a novel scientific tool for the nonverbal communication research to extract metric measurements out of 3D motion data that allow for the application of standard statistical methods such as analysis of variance, factor analysis, or multiple regression analysis. 3D motion data are automatically captured by motion capture systems or manually coded by humans using 3D character animation software. They precisely describe human movements, but without any furter data processing, they cannot meaningfully be interpreted and statistically analyzed. To make this possible, three nonverbal coding systems describing static body postures, dynamic body movements, and proper body part motions such as head nods have been developed. A geometrical model describing postures and movements as flexion angles of body parts on three clearly understandable and nonverbal relevant dimensions —the sagittal, the rotational, and the lateral—has been developed and provides the basis for math formulas which allow the transformation of motion capture data or 3D animation data into metric measures describing body postures, movements, and proper motions. Furthermore, math formulas were developed to compute around 30 nonverbal cues described in the literature on kinesics that can be understood as geometrical features of body parts such as openness, symmetry, and expansiveness of body postures, head position and head nods, gaze direction and body orientation, pointing behavior and relational gestures, interactional synchrony, proxemics, and touch, including dynamic features of movements such as rate, velocity, and acceleration. To obtain accurate measurements, the software APEx (Automatic Parameter Extraction) has been developed with a number of convenient features extracting more than 150 nonverbal parameters consisting 380 metric variables out of available 3D motion data.