Affect Detection from Text-Based Virtual Improvisation and Emotional Gesture Recognition

We have developed an intelligent agent to engage with users in virtual drama improvisation previously. The intelligent agent was able to perform sentence-level affect detection from user inputs with strong emotional indicators. However, we noticed that many inputs with weak or no affect indicators also contain emotional implication but were regarded as neutral expressions by the previous interpretation. In this paper, we employ latent semantic analysis to perform topic theme detection and identify target audiences for such inputs. We also discuss how such semantic interpretation of the dialog contexts is used to interpret affect more appropriately during virtual improvisation. Also, in order to build a reliable affect analyser, it is important to detect and combine weak affect indicators from other channels such as body language. Such emotional body language detection also provides a nonintrusive channel to detect users’ experience without interfering with the primary task. Thus, we also make initial exploration on affect detection from several universally accepted emotional gestures

Affect and Metaphor Sensing in Virtual Drama

We report our developments on metaphor and affect sensing for several metaphorical language phenomena including affects as external entities metaphor, food metaphor, animal metaphor, size metaphor, and anger metaphor. The metaphor and affect sensing component has been embedded in a conversational intelligent agent interacting with human users under loose scenarios. Evaluation for the detection of several metaphorical language phenomena and affect is provided. Our paper contributes to the journal themes on believable virtual characters in real-time narrative environment, narrative in digital games and storytelling and educational gaming with social software

E-Drama: Facilitating Online Role-play using an AI Actor and Emotionally Expressive Characters.

This paper describes a multi-user role-playing environment, e-drama, which enables groups of people to converse online, in scenario driven virtual environments. The starting point of this research – edrama – is a 2D graphical environment in which users are represented by static cartoon figures. An application has been developed to enable integration of the existing edrama tool with several new components to support avatars with emotionally expressive behaviours, rendered in a 3D environment. The functionality includes the extraction of affect from open-ended improvisational text. The results of the affective analysis are then used to: (a) control an automated improvisational AI actor – EMMA (emotion, metaphor and affect) that operates a bit-part character in the improvisation; (b) drive the animations of avatars using the Demeanour framework in the user interface so that they react bodily in ways that are consistent with the affect that they are expressing. Finally, we describe user trials that demonstrate that the changes made improve the quality of social interaction and users’ sense of presence. Moreover, our system has the potential to evolve normal classroom education for young people with or without learning disabilities by providing 24/7 efficient personalised social skill, language and career training via role-play and offering automatic monitoring

eDrama: Facilitating online role-play using emotionally expressive avatars.

Introduction: This paper describes the results of a user study of a multi-user role-playing environment ‘edrama’, which enables groups of people to converse online, in scenario driven virtual environments. Hi8us’ edrama system is a 2D graphical environment in which users are represented by static cartoon like avatars. An application has been developed to enable the integration of the existing edrama tool with several new software components to support avatars with emotionally expressive behaviours, rendered in a 3D environment. In this paper we describe a user trial that demonstrates that the changes made improve the quality of social interaction and users' sense of presence

JuxtaLearn D3.2 Performance Framework

This deliverable, D3.2, for Work Package 3 incorporating the pedagogy from WP2 and orchestration factors mapped in D3.1 reviews aspects of performance in the context of participative video making. It reviews literature on curiosity and engagement characteristics of interaction mechanisms for public displays and anticipates requirements for social network analysis of relevant public videos from WP6 task 6.3. Thus, to support JuxtaLearn performance it proposes a reflective performance framework that encompasses the material environment and objects required, the participants, and the knowledge needed

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Robotic arts: Current practices, potentials, and implications

Given that the origin of the “robot” comes from efforts to create a worker to help people, there has been relatively little research on making a robot for non-work purposes. However, some researchers have explored robotic arts since Leonardo da Vinci. Many questions can be posed regarding the potentials of robotic arts: (1) Is there anything we can call machine-creativity? (2) Can robots improvise artworks on the fly? and (3) Can art robots pass the Turing test? To ponder these questions and see the current status quo of robotic arts, the present paper surveys the contributions of robotics in diverse forms of arts, including drawing, theater, music, and dance. The present paper describes selective projects in each genre, core procedure, possibilities and limitations within the aesthetic computing framework. Then, the paper discusses implications of these robotic arts in terms of both robot research and art research, followed by conclusions including answers to the questions posed at the outset

Human Machine Interaction

In this book, the reader will find a set of papers divided into two sections. The first section presents different proposals focused on the human-machine interaction development process. The second section is devoted to different aspects of interaction, with a special emphasis on the physical interaction