The Tachi Lab is a laboratory specialized in Virtual reality and Telexistence, located in the University of Tokyo.

The Haptics project presents us a way to reinforce and reproduce  emotions experienced through virtual worlds, especially Second Life.

The system is able to recognize nine different emotions in the senteces written by avatars and reinforces own feelings through haptic devices connected to individuals, that for example allow to feel hugs by pressuring on the chest and on the back.

Difficult to imagine?  Watch the following video !

Fresh and good news: the SEMAINE consortium has presented the first full implementation of their virtual affective agent and at the moment is available for download here.

This Sensitive Artifial Listener (SAL) intends to engage users in a conversation by paying attention to unverbal communication and affective states of users. The objective of these SALs are to foster their own emotions within users’ affective states.

You can see a demo in the following video:

More information in the website of the SEMAINE project.