A computer based system to design expressive avatars

Avatars are used in different contexts and situations: e-commerce, e-therapy, virtual worlds, videogames,collaborative online design... In this context, a good design of an avatar may improve the user experience. The ability of controlling the way an avatar convey messages and emotions is capital. In this work, a procedure to design avatar faces capable of conveying to the observer the most suitable sensations according to a given context is developed. The proposed system is based on a combination of genetic algorithms and artificial neural networks whose training is based on perceptual human responses to a set of faces.Diego-Mas, JA.; Alcaide Marzal, J. (2015). A computer based system to design expressive avatars. Computers in Human Behavior. 44:1-11. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.11.027S1114

Autonomous Secondary Gaze Behaviours

In this paper we describe secondary behaviour, this is behaviour that is generated autonomously for an avatar. The user will control various aspects of the avatars behaviour but a truly expressive avatar must produce more complex behaviour than a user could specify in real time. Secondary behaviour provides some of this expressive behaviour autonomously. However, though it is produced autonomously it must produce behaviour that is appropriate to the actions that the user is controlling (the primary behaviour) and it must produce behaviour that corresponds to what the user wants. We describe an architecture which achieves these to aims by tagging the primary behaviour with messages to be sent to the secondary behaviour and by allowing the user to design various aspects of the secondary behaviour before starting to use the avatar. We have implemented this general architecture in a system which adds gaze behaviour to user designed actions

Expressive Messaging on Mobile Platforms

We present a design for expressive multimodal messaging on mobile platforms. Strong context, simple text messages, and crude animations combine well to produce surprisingly expressive results

Using affective avatars and rich multimedia content for education of children with autism

Autism is a communication disorder that mandates early and continuous educational interventions on various levels like the everyday social, communication and reasoning skills. Computer-aided education has recently been considered as a likely intervention method for such cases, and therefore different systems have been proposed and developed worldwide. In more recent years, affective computing applications for the aforementioned interventions have also been proposed to shed light on this problem. In this paper, we examine the technological and educational needs of affective interventions for autistic persons. Enabling affective technologies are visited and a number of possible exploitation scenarios are illustrated. Emphasis is placed in covering the continuous and long term needs of autistic persons by unobtrusive and ubiquitous technologies with the engagement of an affective speaking avatar. A personalised prototype system facilitating these scenarios is described. In addition the feedback from educators for autistic persons is provided for the system in terms of its usefulness, efficiency and the envisaged reaction of the autistic persons, collected by means of an anonymous questionnaire. Results illustrate the clear potential of this effort in facilitating a very promising autism intervention

Direct Manipulation-like Tools for Designing Intelligent Virtual Agents

If intelligent virtual agents are to become widely adopted it is vital that they can be designed using the user friendly graphical tools that are used in other areas of graphics. However, extending this sort of tool to autonomous, interactive behaviour, an area with more in common with artificial intelligence, is not trivial. This paper discusses the issues involved in creating user-friendly design tools for IVAs and proposes an extension of the direct manipulation methodology to IVAs. It also presents an initial implementation of this methodology

Technical pre-study for the ExMS project

This report aims to give an overview of software and hardware platforms available now or in the near future for building a prototype of an ExMS application (for an overview of the ExMS project, see Appendix). The report also gives an overview of the different technologies for building third-party mobile client software applications that are in use today. The report is composed of three sections. The first section is a general discussion on mobile client software and the different technologies that can be used to develop third-party mobile client software. The next section continues with a specific discussion on ExMS and answers the following questions: What is the general architecture of the ExMS application? What alternatives exist for implementing the ExMS prototype? The final section of the report is a recommendation of hardware and software platform for building the ExMS prototype

The role of avatars in e-government interfaces

This paper investigates the use of avatars to communicate live message in e-government interfaces. A comparative study is presented that evaluates the contribution of multimodal metaphors (including avatars) to the usability of interfaces for e-government and user trust. The communication metaphors evaluated included text, earcons, recorded speech and avatars. The experimental platform used for the experiment involved two interface versions with a sample of 30 users. The results demonstrated that the use of multimodal metaphors in an e-government interface can significantly contribute to enhancing the usability and increase trust of users to the e-government interface. A set of design guidelines, for the use of multimodal metaphors in e-government interfaces, was also produced