affective interaction Papers

Enabling virtual agents to quickly and accurately infer users' psychological characteristics such as their personality could support a broad range of applications in education, training, and entertainment. With a focus on narrative-centered learning environments, this paper presents an inductive framework for inferring users' psychological characteristics from observations of their interactions with virtual agents. Trained on traces of users' interactions with virtual agents in the environment, psychological user models are induced from the interactions to accurately... Read more

Psychology suggests highly synchronized expressions of emotion across different modalities. Few experiments jointly studied the relative contribution of facial expression and body posture to the overall perception of emotion. Computational models for expressive virtual characters have to consider how such combinations will be perceived by users. This paper reports on two studies exploring how subjects perceived a virtual agent. The first study evaluates the contribution of the facial and postural expressions to the overall perception... Read more

Facial animation has reached a high level of photorealism. Skin is rendered with grain and translucency, wrinkles are accurate and dynamic. These recent visual improvements are not fully tested for their contribution to the perceived expressiveness of virtual characters. This paper presents a perceptual study assessing the impact of different rendering modes of expressive wrinkles on users' perception of facial expressions of basic and complex emotions. Our results suggest that realistic wrinkles increase agent's expressivity... Read more

In multi-user interaction, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) have to detect mental states of each user to interact smoothly and naturally. In addition, mental states of a person may be affected by extrinsic factors, such as states of people around. Physiological indices was useful to understand mental states of a person. However, it was impractical that ECAs measure physiological indices of users. The purpose of this study was whether we could detect intrinsic "involvement, enjoyment, and/or... Read more

The Affective Guide System is a mobile context-aware and spatial-aware system, offering the user with an affective multimodal interaction interface. The system takes advantage of the current mobile and wireless technologies. It includes an ‘affective guide with attitude’ that links its memories and visitor’s interest to the spatial location so that stories are relevant to what can be immediately seen. This paper presents a review of related work, the system in detail, challenges and the... Read more