Ahmad Hoirul Basori

Haptic Vibration for Emotional Expression of Avatar to Enhance the Realism of Virtual Reality

This paper intends to show the importance of haptic vibration to support emotional expression of avatar in virtual reality systems. As we know emotional avatar plays a vital role to improve the degree of realism in virtual reality. Current practice in virtual reality still lack of interactivity and immersiveness. In this research, we aim to create a realistic avatar based on haptic tactile frequency. The created avatar will be equipped with some intelligence and emotional features in order to support the interactive communication in virtual reality. Using several level of emotion strengths, the created avatar are ask to communicate their emotion through tactile frequency and operated synchronously with the avatar facial expression, acoustic representation and action-reaction between avatars. Several experiments have been conducted based on particular frequencies of haptic tactile to show the visibility of haptic emotional avatar expression. The results proved that the use of several levels of emotion strengths is able to create very realistic avatar expression

Face-Touch: An Emotional Facial Expression Technique of Avatar Based on Tactile Vibration in Virtual Reality Game

Nowadays we can see that avatar expresses their emotional expressions only by using facial animation, gesture and voice. In this research, we present an avatar in a creative way that can attract user attention while they play game and use computer. Human representations like virtual Assistants or virtual humans in the virtual environment are considered as an interface that can make harmonious relationships between human and computer (Wang et al., 2005). A virtual representation of human is expected to become a guideline in the virtual environment. Therefore, studies of artificial psychology have been conducted to create an interface that is able to comply with human satisfaction while they interact with computer. Considering this situation, we can see numerous applications such as Second Life or games like the SIMS manipulates a lot of avatars in their systems. If we look at this matter carefully, the substance of presence, which is the ultimate features for virtual environment application, requires further improvement. The root of the problem is caused by several factors such as: the complexity of virtual human model itself, emotional expression (Wang et al., 2005), or incoherent animation reaction(Rojas et al., 2008). Usually emotion is expressed by facial expression, voice intonation or even using hand gesture. Researchers in image processing and computer graphics fields tried to combine facial expression with voice expression and hand gesture. Recently Haptics or ‘sense of touch’ attracted attention to be explored especially Haptics that is related to emotional expression (Bailenson et al., 2007, Hashimoto and Kajimoto, 2008). In this study, our major concern is to grasp the ways to utilise haptic tactile vibration as an emotional expression of virtual human or avatar that can give the user more sensation during the interactions process. The procedure starts by mapping the human emotion colour diagram into several vibration frequencies. Considering this scenario, a group of frequencies are initiated as a magnetize stimulation to express particular emotional expression such as anger or happiness.