Presentation
The Affective Technology Research Group (ATRG) integrates a group of researchers from different disciplines in the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), whose share a research interest in the affective elements that are natural in any human-computer interaction.
The objective of the group is to develop the line of knowledge that focuses on the affective impact that the use of ICT has on individuals and in general on information society, and specially in these areas: Affective Educational Technology, Affective Technology in Psychology, Affective Technology in Communication, Affective Technology in Computer Science and Affective Technology in Economics.
An emotion markup language
The standardization of Web technologies is part of the work developed by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). One of the groups involved in the development of web standards is the Multimodal Interaction Working Group, responsible for the implementation of emotional elements that computers can handle. This specification has been called Emotion Markup Language. The idea is simple: to go beyond the traditional methods we humans are using to communicate our emotions and the way computers can understand them; basically meaning to go beyond emoticons, so that human computer interaction can be closer to more natural ways of human communication. If you want to read an extended article, go here.
Emotion Mapping
Can you imagine buying a city map based on emotions? Maybe you would visit different places according to specific emotions already tagged for such places instead of going to the 'always-the-same top ten highlights'. Maybe this would fit better what you are looking for in a city ! Chistian Nold has worked with several groups in the design of these maps for five different world cities. Groups of people walking around the city and describing their reactions to particular places in several ways in a digital map. Do not miss the project and the representation of some maps.