SenToy and FantasyA: evaluating affective gaming

Gaming is a highly relevant application area for Intelligent Agents and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Computer games bring us a full set of new gaming experiences where synthetic characters take on the main role.Using affective input in the interaction with a game and in particular with a character is a recent and fairly unexplored dimension. This video presents a study of a tangible interaction device for affective input and its use in a role-playing game where emotions are part of the game logic

Designing gestures for affective input: an analysis of shape, effort and valence

We discuss a user-centered approach to incorporating affective expressions in interactive applications, and argue for a design that addresses both body and mind. In particular, we have studied the problem of finding a set of affective gestures. Based on previous work in movement analysis and emotion theory [Davies, Laban and Lawrence, Russell], and a study of an actor expressing emotional states in body movements, we have identified three underlying dimensions of movements and emotions: shape, effort and valence. From these dimensions we have created a new affective interaction model, which we name the affective gestural plane model. We applied this model to the design of gestural affective input to a mobile service for affective messages

License to chill!: how to empower users to cope with stress

There exists today a paucity of tools and devices that empower people to take control over their everyday behaviors and balance their stress levels. To overcome this deficit, we are creating a mobile service, Affective Health, where we aim to provide a holistic approach towards health by enabling users to make a connection between their daily activities and their own memories and subjective experiences. This construction is based upon values detected from certain bodily reactions that are then visualized on a mobile phone. Accomplishing this entailed figuring out how to provide real-time feedback without making the individual even more stressed, while also making certain that the representation empowered rather than controlled them. Useful design feedback was derived from testing two different visualizations on the mobile in a Wizard of Oz study. In short, we found that a successful design needs to: feel alive, allow for interpretative openness, include short-term history, and be updated in real-time. We also found that the interaction did not increase our participants stress reactions

Voodoo : a system that allows children to create animated films with action figures as interface

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia de InformáticaUsing any kind of dolls as a tangible interface, has the potential to provide a friendly and easy to learn interface that allows children to control virtual characters in a more intuitive way. The research effort in this domain has been motivated by the shortcomings of conventional interfaces, typically mouse and keyboard, which in this context are neither compelling nor do promote immersion. This dissertation focuses on the design and evaluation of a system which can interpret the behaviors that children give to a doll in order to provide this behavioral information to the virtual characters. With this system, the user (children) gets the role of movie director, directing virtual characters through this natural form of interaction. This dissertation aims to evaluate the hypothesis that dolls behaviors recognition based on the context of a well-known story, may enhance the ability of children in the creation of an animated film (virtual characters animations). Unlike many approaches that use a direct mapping of the doll movements to the virtual character, it is intended to test the mapping based on the crosses between, user behavioral intention, and the context where the doll it is inserted (the role and the location of the character in the story). The results show that the concept of interaction proposed to empower the children with a way to create animated films is actually very intuitive and easy to use. However, due to the technology used, it was not possible to assess to what extent this concept really empowers children to easily and joyfully create animated films.A utilização de qualquer tipo de boneco como sendo uma interface tangível, tem o potencial de oferecer uma interface fácil de usar e mais amigável. Isto permite as crianças o controlo de personagens virtuais de uma forma mais intuitiva. O esforço de pesquisa nesta área tem sido motivado pelo facto de os utilizadores não possuírem numa interface convencional uma forma imersiva e intuitiva para interagir. Esta dissertação foca-se na construção e avaliação de um sistema que consegue interpretar os comportamentos que uma criança dá a um boneco no sentido de animar um personagem virtual. Com este sistema o utilizador (criança) assume o papel de um realizador de cinema, dirigindo e dando ordens aos personagens virtuais através de uma forma de interação especifica. Nesta dissertação pretende-se avaliar a hipótese de que o reconhecimento dos comportamentos de um boneco baseado no contexto de uma historia conhecida, pode potenciar a capacidade das crianças na interação e criação de filmes 3D (animação de personagens virtuais). Contrariamente a várias aproximações que usam o mapeamento direto dos movimentos do boneco para o personagem virtual, pretende-se neste trabalho testar o mapeamento baseado no cruzamento entre, a deteção da intenção do utilizador, e o contexto onde o boneco está inserido (o papel e localização do personagem tendo em conta a história). Os resultados demonstram que o conceito de interação proposto para capacitar as crianças com uma forma de criar filmes de animação é realmente muito intuitivo e fácil de utilizar, no entanto devido as tecnologias utilizadas não foi realmente possível avaliar até que ponto este conceito realmente potencia a capacidade das crianças para que de uma forma divertida consigam criar filmes de animação

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

User interfaces for tangible characters: can children connect remotely through toy perspectives

ABSTRACT What if children's make-believe characters could keep in touch when the children were apart? We propose a novel concept for children's use of technology through imagination play: user interfaces designed to be used by children's character toys rather than directly by the children ("doll-computer interfaces"). We apply this model to the challenge of remote communication for children with an enhanced dollhouse containing small-scale interfaces for the dolls with a variety of fully functional multimodal communication functions. Using this interface as a technology probe, we explore a variety of design decisions with remote pairs of children. Our preliminary results suggest that toy-perspective and manipulable toy elements are particularly helpful in supporting play and successful use of communication technologies, while the "true-to-life" toy aspects are sensitive to individual frames of reference and more flexible interfaces that still fit within the toy context lead to creative communication strategies. We found that different communication channels offered interesting tradeoffs between uninterrupted play and rich verbal description. We also learned that the concept appeals to a wide age range but that the youngest children may need additional scaffolding for successful remote play

Emotional recognition in computing

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University 8/4/2010.Emotions are fundamental to human lives and decision-making. Understanding and expression of emotional feeling between people forms an intricate web. This complex interactional phenomena, is a hot topic for research, as new techniques such as brain imaging give us insights about how emotions are tied to human functions. Communication of emotions is mixed with communication of other types of information (such as factual details) and emotions can be consciously or unconsciously displayed. Affective computer systems, using sensors for emotion recognition and able to make emotive responses are under development. The increased potential for emotional interaction with products and services, in many domains, is generating much interest. Emotionally enhanced systems have potential to improve human computer interaction and so to improve how systems are used and what they can deliver. They may also have adverse implications such as creating systems capable of emotional manipulation of users. Affective systems are in their infancy and lack human complexity and capability. This makes it difficult to assess whether human interaction with such systems will actually prove beneficial or desirable to users. By using experimental design, a Wizard of Oz methodology and a game that appeared to respond to the user’s emotional signals with human-like capability, I tested user experience and reactions to a system that appeared affective. To assess users’ behaviour, I developed a novel affective behaviour coding system called ‘affectemes’. I found significant gains in user satisfaction and performance when using an affective system. Those believing the system responded to emotional signals blinked more frequently. If the machine failed to respond to their emotional signals, they increased their efforts to convey emotion, which might be an attempt to ‘repair’ the interaction. This work highlights how very complex and difficult it is to design and evaluate affective systems. I identify many issues for future work, including the unconscious nature of emotions and how they are recognised and displayed with affective systems; issues about the power of emotionally interactive systems and their evaluation; and critical ethical issues. These are important considerations for future design of systems that use emotion recognition in computing.EPSRC project grant (R81374/01

Designing Affective Loop Experiences

There is a lack of attention to the emotional and the physical aspects of communication in how we up to now have been approaching communication between people in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). As de-signers of digital communication tools we need to consider altering the un-derlying model for communication that has been prevailing in HCI: the in-formation transfer model. Communication is about so much more than trans-ferring information. It is about getting to know yourself, who you are and what part you play in the communication as it unfolds. It is also about the experience of a communication process, what it feels like, how that feeling changes, when it changes, why and perhaps by whom the process is initiated, altered, or disrupted. The idea of Affective Loop experiences in design aims to create new expressive and experiential media for whole users, embodied with the social and physical world they live in, and where communication not only is about getting the message across but also about living the experi-ence of communication- feeling it. An Affective Loop experience is an emerging, in the moment, emotional experience where the inner emotional experience, the situation at hand and the social and physical context act together, to create for one complete em-bodied experience. The loop perspective comes from how this experience takes place in communication and how there is a rhythmic pattern in com-munication where those involved take turns in both expressing themselves and standing back interpreting the moment. To allow for Affective Loop experiences with or through a computer system, the user needs to be allowed to express herself in rich personal ways involv-ing our many ways of expressing and sensing emotions – muscles tensions, facial expressions and more. For the user to become further engaged in inter-action, the computer system needs the capability to return relevant, either diminishing, enforcing or disruptive feedback to those emotions expressed by the user so that the she wants to continue express herself by either strengthening, changing or keeping her expression. We describe how we used the idea of Affective Loop experiences as a con-ceptual tool to navigate a design space of gestural input combined with rich instant feedback. In our design journey, we created two systems, eMoto and FriendSense