362 research outputs found
Entertainment capture through heart rate activity in physical interactive playgrounds
An approach for capturing and modeling individual entertainment (âfunâ) preferences is applied to users of the innovative Playware playground, an interactive physical playground inspired by computer games, in this study. The goal is to construct, using representative statistics computed from childrenâs physiological signals, an estimator of the degree to which games provided by the playground engage the players. For this purpose childrenâs heart rate (HR) signals, and their expressed preferences of how much âfunâ particular game variants are, are obtained from experiments using games implemented on the Playware playground. A comprehensive statistical analysis shows that childrenâs reported entertainment preferences correlate well with specific features of the HR signal. Neuro-evolution techniques combined with feature set selection methods permit the construction of user models that predict reported entertainment preferences given HR features. These models are expressed as artificial neural networks and are demonstrated and evaluated on two Playware games and two control tasks requiring physical activity. The best network is able to correctly match expressed preferences in 64% of cases on previously unseen data (pâvalue 6 ¡ 10â5). The generality of the methodology, its limitations, its usability as a real-time feedback mechanism for entertainment augmentation and as a validation tool are discussed.peer-reviewe
Enhancing health care via affective computing
Affective computing is a multidisciplinary field that studies the various ways by which computational processes are able to elicit, sense, and detect manifestations of human emotion. While the methods and technology delivered by affective computing have demonstrated very promising results across several domains, their adoption by healthcare is still at its initial stages. With that aim in mind, this commentary paper introduces affective computing to the readership of the journal and praises for the benefits of affect-enabled systems for prognostic, diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.peer-reviewe
A panorama of artificial and computational intelligence in games
This paper attempts to give a high-level overview
of the field of artificial and computational intelligence (AI/CI)
in games, with particular reference to how the different core
research areas within this field inform and interact with each
other, both actually and potentially. We identify ten main
research areas within this field: NPC behavior learning, search
and planning, player modeling, games as AI benchmarks,
procedural content generation, computational narrative, believable
agents, AI-assisted game design, general game artificial
intelligence and AI in commercial games. We view and analyze
the areas from three key perspectives: (1) the dominant AI
method(s) used under each area; (2) the relation of each area
with respect to the end (human) user; and (3) the placement of
each area within a human-computer (player-game) interaction
perspective. In addition, for each of these areas we consider how
it could inform or interact with each of the other areas; in those
cases where we find that meaningful interaction either exists or
is possible, we describe the character of that interaction and
provide references to published studies, if any. We believe that
this paper improves understanding of the current nature of the
game AI/CI research field and the interdependences between
its core areas by providing a unifying overview. We also believe
that the discussion of potential interactions between research
areas provides a pointer to many interesting future research
projects and unexplored subfields.peer-reviewe
Affective Game Computing: A Survey
This paper surveys the current state of the art in affective computing
principles, methods and tools as applied to games. We review this emerging
field, namely affective game computing, through the lens of the four core
phases of the affective loop: game affect elicitation, game affect sensing,
game affect detection and game affect adaptation. In addition, we provide a
taxonomy of terms, methods and approaches used across the four phases of the
affective game loop and situate the field within this taxonomy. We continue
with a comprehensive review of available affect data collection methods with
regards to gaming interfaces, sensors, annotation protocols, and available
corpora. The paper concludes with a discussion on the current limitations of
affective game computing and our vision for the most promising future research
directions in the field
Adapting models of visual aesthetics for personalized content creation
This paper introduces a search-based approach to
personalized content generation with respect to visual aesthetics.
The approach is based on a two-step adaptation procedure
where (1) the evaluation function that characterizes the content
is adjusted to match the visual aesthetics of users and (2) the
content itself is optimized based on the personalized evaluation
function. To test the efficacy of the approach we design fitness
functions based on universal properties of visual perception,
inspired by psychological and neurobiological research. Using
these visual properties we generate aesthetically pleasing 2D
game spaceships via neuroevolutionary constrained optimization
and evaluate the impact of the designed visual properties on the
generated spaceships. The offline generated spaceships are used
as the initial population of an interactive evolution experiment in
which players are asked to choose spaceships according to their
visual taste: the impact of the various visual properties is adjusted
based on player preferences and new content is generated online
based on the updated computational model of visual aesthetics
of the player. Results are presented which show the potential of
the approach in generating content which is based on subjective
criteria of visual aesthetics.Thanks to all the participants of the interactive evolution
experiement. The research was supported, in part, by the
FP7 ICT project SIREN (project no: 258453) and by the
Danish Research Agency, Ministry of Science, Technology
and Innovation project AGameComIn; project number: 274-
09-0083.peer-reviewe
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