Organized by the IEEE CIS Task Force on Player Satisfaction Modeling and the Humaine Association SIG on Games and Entertainment
21 August 2010 - 21 August 2010 Copenhagen, Denmark

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 !

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.

*** 18 May 2010, Malta ***

This LREC 2010 workshop on multimodal corpora will feature a special
session on databases of motion capture, trackers, inertial sensors,
biometric devices and image processing.

http://www.multimodal-corpora.org

Link to the journal

The headset allows the gathering of data in three categories of inputs: conscious thoughts, emotions and facial expressions. There is a lot to say about the capabilities of EPOC to measure emotion-related data and about executing specific actions based on previously trained thoughts, but we have been dedicating some effort to test the effectivity in the identification of facial expressions and the results are pretty interesting.

EPOC picks up signals of the facial muscles through EEG sensors. It is in this way that expressions like smiling, laughing or jaw or teeth clenching are detected by the system once it has been trained by a particular person. Detections are generally very fast (10 ms) and the degree of accuracy is quite good.

The possibilities of EPOC for the educational and gaming industry are huge. Further news in our research will be announced in this blog.

For more information visit Emotiv.

The experience aimed to test an open learning model, understood as a virtual learning environment open to the Internet community, based on the use of open resources and on a methodology focused on the participation and collaboration of users in the construction of knowledge.

The subject of the course ‘Journeys 2.0′ lasted 5 weeks, was launched through Facebook and used a specifically designed open methodology. This methodology of the course is based on the creation of a learning community able to self-manage their learning process. For that a facilitator was needed and also a central activity was established for people to participate and contribute in the community.

The main hypothesis was that students join the course because of personal motivation, interests and desire to learn in a collaborative experience with others. From the point of view of engagement, one of the keywords of the course, results will be presented soon.

To assess the validity of affect-tagging as a new method for measuring user experience, Mary Frances Jones from the Georgia Tech University and the Affective Technology Research Group conducted a survey to compare verbal self-response surveys vs. non-verbal self-response surveys. Based on a review of the literature, the hypothesis was that affect-tagging could capture more clear and meaningful data, and ultimately richer insights into the user’s overall experience with an interface.

At the time of this report, some participants are still completing the survey. However, early analysis of the data suggests that, compared with traditional verbal surveys, affect-tagging shows promise for detecting the presence of negative, low intensity emotions which users are notoriously less likely to self-report in verbal surveys. This could be promising as a means of measuring user emotion with more reliability, especially when combined with other non-verbal, physiological measurement techniques such as eye tracking, facial scanning and galvanic skin sensing.

The last edition was organized in Vancouver (Canada) and brought experts in these fields from around the world. The use of web 2.0 tools in learning scenarios, open resources and evaluation were among the main themes of the sessions.

Our team presented a paper where we showed the first steps that the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya is following in its effort to introduce the affective dimension in the core of the e-learning design process. We believe that our first stages could be useful for other institutions interested to include the affective dimension within the design of their online environment. We have concluded that three steps should be the starting point: a specific methodology to gather affective information, a set of general affective principles to guide designers’ tasks and “testing & playing” with new tools and methodologies already available in the market.

Please find the paper by clicking here

At the moment we can offer some results and conclusions that may be useful for other institutions in their attempts to assess learning tools from an affective point of view.

Download the poster of the study

Dowload a conference paper of the study