The uncanny valley of a virtual animal.

Virtual robots, including virtual animals, are expected to play a major role within affective and aesthetic interfaces, serious games, video instruction, and the personalization of educational instruction. Their actual impact, however, will very much depend on user perception of virtual characters as the uncanny valley hypothesis has shown that the design of virtual characters determines user experiences. In this article, we investigated whether the uncanny valley effect, which has already been found for the human-like appearance of virtual characters, can also be found for animal-like appearances. We conducted an online study (N = 163) in which six different animal designs were evaluated in terms of the following properties: familiarity, commonality, naturalness, attractiveness, interestingness, and animateness. The study participants differed in age (under 10–60 years) and origin (Europe, Asia, North America, and South America). For the evaluation of the results, we ranked the animal-likeness of the character using both expert opinion and participant judgments. Next to that, we investigated the effect of movement and morbidity. The results confirm the existence of the uncanny valley effect for virtual animals, especially with respect to familiarity and commonality, for both still and moving images. The effect was particularly pronounced for morbid images. For naturalness and attractiveness, the effect was only present in the expert-based ranking, but not in the participant-based ranking. No uncanny valley effect was detected for interestingness and animateness. This investigation revealed that the appearance of virtual animals directly affects user perception and thus, presumably, impacts user experience when used in applied settings

The Bee\u27s Knees or Spines of a Spider: What Makes an \u27Insect\u27 Interesting?

Insects and their kin (bugs) are among the most detested and despised creatures on earth. Irrational fears of these mostly harmless organisms often restrict and prevent opportunities for outdoor recreation and leisure. Alternatively, Shipley and Bixler (2016) theorize that direct and positive experiences with bugs during middle childhood may result in fascination with insects leading to comfort in wildland settings. The objective of this research was to examine and identify the novel and unfamiliar bug types that people are more likely to find interesting and visually attend to when spontaneously presented with their images. This research examined these questions through four integrated exploratory studies. The first study (n = 216) found that a majority of adults are unfamiliar with a majority of bugs, despite the abundance of many common but ˜unfamiliar\u27 bugs. The second (n = 15) and third (n = 308) study examined participant\u27s first impressions of unfamiliar bugs. The second study consisted of in-depth interviews, while the third study had participants report their perceptions of bugs across multiple emotional dimensions. Together, both studies suggest there are many unfamiliar bugs that are perceptually novel and perceived as interesting when encountered. The fourth study (n = 48) collected metrics of visual attention using eye-tracking by measuring visual fixations while participants viewed different bugs identified through previous studies as either being interesting or disinteresting. The findings of the fourth study suggest that interesting bugs can capture more visual attention than uninteresting bugs. Results from all four studies provide a heuristic for interpretive naturalists, magazine editors, marketers, public relation advisors, filmmakers, and any other visual communication professional that can be used in the choice of images of unfamiliar images of insects and other small invertebrates to evoke situational interest and motivate subsequent behavior

Collecting, Analyzing and Predicting Socially-Driven Image Interestingness

International audienceInterestingness has recently become an emerging concept for visual content assessment. However, understanding and predicting image interestingness remains challenging as its judgment is highly subjective and usually context-dependent. In addition, existing datasets are quite small for in-depth analysis. To push forward research in this topic, a large-scale interestingness dataset (images and their associated metadata) is described in this paper and released for public use. We then propose computational models based on deep learning to predict image interestingness. We show that exploiting relevant contextual information derived from social metadata could greatly improve the prediction results. Finally we discuss some key findings and potential research directions for this emerging topic

MediaEval 2016 Predicting Media Interestingness Task

Volume: 1739 Host publication title: MediaEval 2016 Multimedia Benchmark Workshop Host publication sub-title: Working Notes Proceedings of the MediaEval 2016 WorkshopNon peer reviewe

6 Seconds of Sound and Vision: Creativity in Micro-Videos

The notion of creativity, as opposed to related concepts such as beauty or interestingness, has not been studied from the perspective of automatic analysis of multimedia content. Meanwhile, short online videos shared on social media platforms, or micro-videos, have arisen as a new medium for creative expression. In this paper we study creative micro-videos in an effort to understand the features that make a video creative, and to address the problem of automatic detection of creative content. Defining creative videos as those that are novel and have aesthetic value, we conduct a crowdsourcing experiment to create a dataset of over 3,800 micro-videos labelled as creative and non-creative. We propose a set of computational features that we map to the components of our definition of creativity, and conduct an analysis to determine which of these features correlate most with creative video. Finally, we evaluate a supervised approach to automatically detect creative video, with promising results, showing that it is necessary to model both aesthetic value and novelty to achieve optimal classification accuracy.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figures, conference IEEE CVPR 201

Overt Attention and Context Factors: The Impact of Repeated Presentations, Image Type, and Individual Motivation

The present study investigated the dynamic of the attention focus during observation of different categories of complex scenes and simultaneous consideration of individuals' memory and motivational state. We repeatedly presented four types of complex visual scenes in a pseudo-randomized order and recorded eye movements. Subjects were divided into groups according to their motivational disposition in terms of action orientation and individual rating of scene interest

Emotional Response to Auditory and Visual Stimuli

Emotion can be studied by measuring physiological, behavioral, and verbal responses to specific stimuli. In current research, it is most common to use visual stimuli to measure the emotional response. One of the most common sets of stimuli used for this purpose is the International Affective Picture Systems (IAPS). An additional set of stimuli, the International Affective Digital Sounds (IADS), was created to be an auditory equivalent of the IAPS. The present study sought to compare the emotional response (measured with Heart Rate, Skin Conductance, and a self-report measure of emotion called the SAM) to sounds from the IADS and images from the IAPS. The self-report measure has participants rate each stimulus for arousal, valence, dominance, and interestingness by using a nine point scale anchored at one end by calm, unpleasant, not in control, and boring and at the other by excited, pleasant, in full control, and riveting, respectively. The present study also looked at differences in emotional response to sounds and images when they were presented in a pure block (all images and then all sounds or reverse) compared to a mixed block (a block of sounds and images, followed by a block of sounds and images). There were a total of 40 participants (34 female, 4 male; mean age 27.08), all of whom were recruited from a local university. Results revealed a significant difference (p \u3c .05) in the heart rate and skin conductance response to sounds versus images. There was also a significant (p \u3c .05) difference in self-reported arousal and dominance to images and sounds. Furthermore, there was a significant difference (p \u3c .05) between the Pure Stimulus and Mixed Stimulus groups for heart rate and self-reported arousal and dominance. Results from this study do not support the theory that auditory and visual stimuli evoke similar physiological and self-reported emotional responses. Results also suggest that stimulus presentation may play a role in the observed or perceived difference in emotional response

The influence of city centre environments on the affective walking experience

The current PhD thesis explores the influence of the built environment on the affective walking experience. In fact, while urbanisation trends are increasing, levels of walking in urban settings are decreasing, despite to the important health, social, and environmental benefits of walking. However, while there is a rich body of research indicating that walking in natural spaces supports psychological wellbeing, there is a general lack of literature on the potential benefits of walking in urban settings specifically. A novel theoretical framework is applied, combining two main disciplines: environmental psychology literature on environmental affect and restoration, and geographical literature on walking and mobilities. The following questions are addressed:-In what ways can walking in urban environments support affect? What is the role of motor traffic and architectural styles on the affective walking experience?-What are enablers and barriers to a positive affective walking experience in urban contexts other than presence of natural elements?-To what extent does the affective walking experience influence walking intentions?A mixed-methods strategy was adopted. First, an online experiment with residents of Bristol (UK) (n=385) compared affective outcomes of walking in five settings in Bristol city centre following a video-simulated walk. Second, a sub-sample of 14 participants was involved in photo and video-elicited interviews based on a real walk.Quantitative results showed that simulated walks in pedestrianised areas without green elements were associated with affective benefits, as opposed to a commercial area with traffic. Building on these findings, the qualitative phase showed that motor traffic, poor aesthetics, and city busyness have a negative impact on affect. On the other hand, presence of nature and a connection with place supported affect. Specifically, it emerged that such connection is enabled by personal associations, historic elements, and sense of community.This thesis offers the following main contributions. First, it offers a novel empirical assessment of the affective outcomes of walking in different urban settings and reveals that some urban walking settings support psychological wellbeing. Second, it offers a systematic, empirically-based characterisation of barriers and enablers of a positive affective walking experience in built settings. Finally, it shows how theories of environmental affect can inform active travel policies by revealing that a positive affective and restorative walking experience can encourage walking