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.

LREC 2010 Workshop on Multimodal Corpora: Advances in Capturing, Coding and Analyzing Multimodality

*** 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

The IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing is a new journal intended to be a cross disciplinary and international archive journal aimed at disseminating results of research on the design of systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions and related affective phenomena.

Link to the journal

A few months ago we acquired a new headset with a brain-computer interface called EPOC; a product developed by Emotiv Systems.

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.

Social learning in Facebook: an experience at UOC was presented in the 6th Chair of UNESCO in e-learning

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.

One of the simplest and most commonly-used tools for measuring the affective dimension of user experience is the verbal self-response survey. Unfortunately, these tools aren’t always effective because users sometimes unintentionally repress or don’t recognize their own emotions. By contrast, non-verbal tools use the concept of “affect-tagging” to capture a more intuitive, instinctive emotional response from the user about their immediate emotional state. By presenting users with animated, multimedia emotional characters instead of words, affect-tagging has proven to be better at detecting low intensity emotions, particularly those most common in an HCI context.

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 E-Learn–World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher Education is an international conference organized by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) and co-sponsored by the International Journal on E-Learning.

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

The Joy of Learning team has been developing a project aimed  to evaluate the overall satisfaction and the affective responses of our students when performing tasks in a virtual learning environment.
We have triangulated three complementary affect assessment methods: facial expression interpretations, pupil scanning and students as self-evaluators (participant self-assessment).

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

The HCI in Emotion workshop will take place on the 1st of September in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

This year’s workshop is focusing on the development of affective technologies for real-world applications and the issues that this orientation brings to our research.

The workshop is adressed for individuals working in the different fields affected by emotion, giving them a podium to raise their questions and work with like-minded people of various disciplines on common subjects.

The Joy of Learning team will present a paper called ‘Case study on the integration of the affective dimension in the design of virtual learning environments: evaluating emotions, supporting design and experimenting new methodologies‘.

This paper presents a proposal for fully online or blended learning universities to introduce the affective dimension in online learning design.

The proposal is supported on three bases: a system for affective assessment (based on the combination of FACS, pupilometry and self-assessment), a set of principles to integrate affective elements within course design and some further steps for innovation and experimentation with new technologies and methodologies.