Affective interactions between expressive characters

When people meet in virtual worlds they are represented by computer animated characters that lack a variety of expression and can seem stiff and robotic. By comparison human bodies are highly expressive; a casual observation of a group of people mil reveals a large diversity of behavior, different postures, gestures and complex patterns of eye gaze. In order to make computer mediated communication between people more like real face-to-face communication, it is necessary to add an affective dimension. This paper presents Demeanour, an affective semi-autonomous system for the generation of realistic body language in avatars. Users control their avatars that in turn interact autonomously with other avatars to produce expressive behaviour. This allows people to have affectively rich interactions via their avatars

Affective Medicine: a review of Affective Computing efforts in Medical Informatics

Background: Affective computing (AC) is concerned with emotional interactions performed with and through computers. It is defined as “computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions”. AC enables investigation and understanding of the relation between human emotions and health as well as application of assistive and useful technologies in the medical domain. Objectives: 1) To review the general state of the art in AC and its applications in medicine, and 2) to establish synergies between the research communities of AC and medical informatics. Methods: Aspects related to the human affective state as a determinant of the human health are discussed, coupled with an illustration of significant AC research and related literature output. Moreover, affective communication channels are described and their range of application fields is explored through illustrative examples. Results: The presented conferences, European research projects and research publications illustrate the recent increase of interest in the AC area by the medical community. Tele-home healthcare, AmI, ubiquitous monitoring, e-learning and virtual communities with emotionally expressive characters for elderly or impaired people are few areas where the potential of AC has been realized and applications have emerged. Conclusions: A number of gaps can potentially be overcome through the synergy of AC and medical informatics. The application of AC technologies parallels the advancement of the existing state of the art and the introduction of new methods. The amount of work and projects reviewed in this paper witness an ambitious and optimistic synergetic future of the affective medicine field

The Mountains Are Calling

Mark Knapp’s Relationship Model in Communication Studies attempts to limit human relationships to a specific, linear array of stages and categories. This research project attempts to critique the rigidity of Knapp’s model, while simultaneously attempting to posit film as an incredibly influential tool (if not an alternative model entirely) for communication both diegetically – within the realm of the film – and in conversation with an audience. The silent nature of the creative filmed portion of this project is in direct opposition to Knapp’s model, which inadvertently roots human relationships in language

Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems

As robotic systems are moved out of factory work cells into human-facing environments questions of choreography become central to their design, placement, and application. With a human viewer or counterpart present, a system will automatically be interpreted within context, style of movement, and form factor by human beings as animate elements of their environment. The interpretation by this human counterpart is critical to the success of the system's integration: knobs on the system need to make sense to a human counterpart; an artificial agent should have a way of notifying a human counterpart of a change in system state, possibly through motion profiles; and the motion of a human counterpart may have important contextual clues for task completion. Thus, professional choreographers, dance practitioners, and movement analysts are critical to research in robotics. They have design methods for movement that align with human audience perception, can identify simplified features of movement for human-robot interaction goals, and have detailed knowledge of the capacity of human movement. This article provides approaches employed by one research lab, specific impacts on technical and artistic projects within, and principles that may guide future such work. The background section reports on choreography, somatic perspectives, improvisation, the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, and robotics. From this context methods including embodied exercises, writing prompts, and community building activities have been developed to facilitate interdisciplinary research. The results of this work is presented as an overview of a smattering of projects in areas like high-level motion planning, software development for rapid prototyping of movement, artistic output, and user studies that help understand how people interpret movement. Finally, guiding principles for other groups to adopt are posited.Comment: Under review at MDPI Arts Special Issue "The Machine as Artist (for the 21st Century)" http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/Machine_Artis

Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

Affective issues in learning technologies: emotional responses to technology and technology's role in supporting socio-emotional skills

This paper focuses on some of the author's research studies over the past thirty years and places these in a wider context to reflect on research into affective issues in learning technologies over this period, and to consider whether and how the issues uncovered by research have changed as technologies have developed over time. Three issues are given particular attention: firstly the reasons for learners' use or lack of use of technologies for their learning; secondly adult learners' attitudes towards using technology for learning and thirdly how technology might support socio-emotional development and expression in children. The discussion of these issues is framed by two of the author's research projects. For the first two issues this is an early study of students' perceptions and attitudes towards using computers for tutorial learning in 1980. The factors that influenced the students' use of the computer tutorials are discussed (including access, assessment and anxiety about using computers) and also the extent to which some of these factors persist for many learners using (or not using) technologies today. The discussion of the third issue draws on a series of studies conducted in the 1990s to investigate whether educational technology could support children and young people's emotional expression and communication and development of socio-emotional skills. Finally the paper considers how these kinds of issues have been taken forward and how they are represented in contemporary research and suggests that trust is an important factor in using learning technologies

Affective issues in learning technologies: emotional responses to technology and technology's role in supporting socio-emotional skills

This paper focuses on some of the author's research studies over the past thirty years and places these in a wider context to reflect on research into affective issues in learning technologies over this period, and to consider whether and how the issues uncovered by research have changed as technologies have developed over time. Three issues are given particular attention: firstly the reasons for learners' use or lack of use of technologies for their learning; secondly adult learners' attitudes towards using technology for learning and thirdly how technology might support socio-emotional development and expression in children. The discussion of these issues is framed by two of the author's research projects. For the first two issues this is an early study of students' perceptions and attitudes towards using computers for tutorial learning in 1980. The factors that influenced the students' use of the computer tutorials are discussed (including access, assessment and anxiety about using computers) and also the extent to which some of these factors persist for many learners using (or not using) technologies today. The discussion of the third issue draws on a series of studies conducted in the 1990s to investigate whether educational technology could support children and young people's emotional expression and communication and development of socio-emotional skills. Finally the paper considers how these kinds of issues have been taken forward and how they are represented in contemporary research and suggests that trust is an important factor in using learning technologies

A proposed framework of an interactive semi-virtual environment for enhanced education of children with autism spectrum disorders

Education of people with special needs has recently been considered as a key element in the field of medical education. Recent development in the area of information and communication technologies may enable development of collaborative interactive environments which facilitate early stage education and provide specialists with robust tools indicating the person's autism spectrum disorder level. Towards the goal of establishing an enhanced learning environment for children with autism this paper attempts to provide a framework of a semi-controlled real-world environment used for the daily education of an autistic person according to the scenarios selected by the specialists. The proposed framework employs both real-world objects and virtual environments equipped with humanoids able to provide emotional feedback and to demonstrate empathy. Potential examples and usage scenarios for such environments are also described

Towards responsive Sensitive Artificial Listeners

This paper describes work in the recently started project SEMAINE, which aims to build a set of Sensitive Artificial Listeners – conversational agents designed to sustain an interaction with a human user despite limited verbal skills, through robust recognition and generation of non-verbal behaviour in real-time, both when the agent is speaking and listening. We report on data collection and on the design of a system architecture in view of real-time responsiveness