Dynamic Facial Expression of Emotion Made Easy

Facial emotion expression for virtual characters is used in a wide variety of areas. Often, the primary reason to use emotion expression is not to study emotion expression generation per se, but to use emotion expression in an application or research project. What is then needed is an easy to use and flexible, but also validated mechanism to do so. In this report we present such a mechanism. It enables developers to build virtual characters with dynamic affective facial expressions. The mechanism is based on Facial Action Coding. It is easy to implement, and code is available for download. To show the validity of the expressions generated with the mechanism we tested the recognition accuracy for 6 basic emotions (joy, anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear) and 4 blend emotions (enthusiastic, furious, frustrated, and evil). Additionally we investigated the effect of VC distance (z-coordinate), the effect of the VC's face morphology (male vs. female), the effect of a lateral versus a frontal presentation of the expression, and the effect of intensity of the expression. Participants (n=19, Western and Asian subjects) rated the intensity of each expression for each condition (within subject setup) in a non forced choice manner. All of the basic emotions were uniquely perceived as such. Further, the blends and confusion details of basic emotions are compatible with findings in psychology

Dimensional Affect and Expression in Natural and Mediated Interaction

There is a perceived controversy as to whether the cognitive representation of affect is better modelled using a dimensional or categorical theory. This paper first suggests that these views are, in fact, compatible. The paper then discusses this theme and related issues in reference to a commonly stated application domain of research on human affect and expression: human computer interaction (HCI). The novel suggestion here is that a more realistic framing of studies of human affect in expression with reference to HCI and, particularly HCHI (Human-Computer-Human Interaction) entails some re-formulation of the approach to the basic phenomena themselves. This theme is illustrated with several examples from several recent research projects.Comment: Invited article presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the International Society for Psychophysics, Tokyo, Japan, 20-23 October, 2007, Proceedings of Fechner Day vol. 23 (2007

Determining what people feel and think when interacting with humans and machines

Any interactive software program must interpret the users’ actions and come up with an appropriate response that is intelligable and meaningful to the user. In most situations, the options of the user are determined by the software and hardware and the actions that can be carried out are unambiguous. The machine knows what it should do when the user carries out an action. In most cases, the user knows what he has to do by relying on conventions which he may have learned by having had a look at the instruction manual, having them seen performed by somebody else, or which he learned by modifying a previously learned convention. Some, or most, of the times he just finds out by trial and error. In user-friendly interfaces, the user knows, without having to read extensive manuals, what is expected from him and how he can get the machine to do what he wants. An intelligent interface is so-called, because it does not assume the same kind of programming of the user by the machine, but the machine itself can figure out what the user wants and how he wants it without the user having to take all the trouble of telling it to the machine in the way the machine dictates but being able to do it in his own words. Or perhaps by not using any words at all, as the machine is able to read off the intentions of the user by observing his actions and expressions. Ideally, the machine should be able to determine what the user wants, what he expects, what he hopes will happen, and how he feels

Exploiting multimedia in creating and analysing multimedia Web archives

The data contained on the web and the social web are inherently multimedia and consist of a mixture of textual, visual and audio modalities. Community memories embodied on the web and social web contain a rich mixture of data from these modalities. In many ways, the web is the greatest resource ever created by human-kind. However, due to the dynamic and distributed nature of the web, its content changes, appears and disappears on a daily basis. Web archiving provides a way of capturing snapshots of (parts of) the web for preservation and future analysis. This paper provides an overview of techniques we have developed within the context of the EU funded ARCOMEM (ARchiving COmmunity MEMories) project to allow multimedia web content to be leveraged during the archival process and for post-archival analysis. Through a set of use cases, we explore several practical applications of multimedia analytics within the realm of web archiving, web archive analysis and multimedia data on the web in general