Vasco Vinhas

Biometric Emotion Assessment and Feedback in an Immersive Digital Environment

Affective computing has increased its significance both in terms of academic and industry attention and investment. Alongside, immersive digital environments have settled as a reliable domain, with progressively inexpensive hardware solutions. Having this in mind, the authors envisioned the automatic real-time user emotion extraction through biometric readings in an immersive digital environment. In the running example, the environment consisted in an aeronautical simulation, and biometric readings were based mainly on galvanic skin response, respiration rate and amplitude, and phalanx temperature. The assessed emotional states were also used to modify some simulation context variables, such as flight path, weather conditions and maneuver smoothness level. The results were consistent with the emotional states as stated by the users, achieving a success rate of 77%, considering single emotions and 86% considering a quadrant-based analysis.

A New Approach to Emotion Assessment Based on Biometric Data

Several knowledge areas such as psychology, medicine and computer science have been devoting serious efforts regarding emotional state definition, identification and assessment. This project consists in an automatic emotion assessment tool based on biometric data acquisition supported by low-budget biometric devices as a electroencephalograph and a galvanic skin response. The classification is grounded on data analysis and processing of standard emotional induction methods. The numerous conducted experimental sessions,alongside with the developed support tools, allowed the extraction of conclusions such as the capability of effectively performing automatic classification of the subjectpsilas predominant emotional state. The developed tools success rate, validated against self assessment interviews, was approximately 75%. It was also experimentally concluded that female subjects are emotionally more active and easily induced than males.

Effect of the usage of wikis on an educational context

The use of wiki tools in personal and professional contexts has increased in the past years. This article provides an overview on recent developments of wiki technologies, and tries to determine their acceptance level in an academic environment. Also, suggestions are presented that may influence future developments in this area.

BioStories: Dynamic Multimedia Environments Based on Real-Time Audience Emotion Assessment

BioStories is the outcome of a four-year research project focused in uniting affective and ubiquitous computing with context aware multimedia environments real-time generation. Its initial premise was based in the possibility of performing real-time automatic emotion assessment trough online biometric channels monitoring and use this information to design on-the-fly dynamic multimedia storylines emotionally adapted, so that end users would unconsciously be determining the story graph. The emotion assessment process was based on biometric channels dynamic fusion such as EEG, GSR, respiration rate and volume, skin temperature and heart rate on top of Russell’s circumplex model of affect. BioStories’ broad scope also allowed for some spin-off projects namely mouse control through EMG that resulted in a tested technology for alternative/ inclusive interfaces. Exhaustive experiments showed 86% of success rate for emotion assessment, IC95%(p)≈(0.81, 0.90), in a dynamic tridimensional virtual environment with an immersiveness user score of 4.3 out of 5. The success of the proposed approach allows the vision of its appliance in several domains such as virtual entertainment, videogames and cinema as well as direct marketing, digital TV and domotic appliances.

General-Purpose Emotion Assessment Testbed Based on Biometric Information

While affective computing and the entertainment industry still maintain a substantial gap between themselves, biosignals are subject of digital acquisition through low budget technologic solutions at neglectable invasive levels. The integration of electroencephalography, galvanic skin response and oximeter in a multichannel framework constitutes an effort in the path to identify emotional states via biosignals expression. To induce and detect specific emotions, gender-specific sessions were defined based on International Affective Picture System and performed in a controlled environment. Data was collected and visualized in real-time by the session instructor and stored for processing and analysis. Results granted by distinct analysis techniques showed that high frequency EEG waves are strongly related to emotions and are a solid ground to perform accurate emotion classification. They have also given strong indications that females are more sensitive to emotion induction. One might conclude that the attained success levels concerning relating emotions to biosignals are extremely encouraging not only to this research topic but also to the its application in domains such as multimedia entertainment, advertising and medical treatments.

Realtime Dynamic Multimedia Storyline Based on Online Audience Biometric Information

Audience complete action immersion sensation is still the ultimate goal of the multimedia industry. In spite of the significant technical audiovisual advances that enable more realistic contents, coping with individual audience needs and desires is still an incomplete achievement. The proposed project’s intention is to contribute for solving this issue through enabling real-time dynamic multimedia storylines with emotional subconscious audience interaction. Individual emotional state assessment is accomplished by direct access to online biometric information. Recent technologic breakthroughs have enabled the usage of minimal invasive biometric hardware devices that no longer interfere with the audience immersion feeling. Other key module of the project is the conceptualization of a dynamic storyline multimedia content system with emotional metadata, responsible for enabling discrete or continuous storyline route options. The unifying component is the definition of the full-duplex communication protocol. The current stage of research has already produced a spin-off product capable of providing computer mouse control through electromyography and has identified key factors in human emotions through experiments conducted in the developed system’s architecture that have enabled semi-automatic emotion assessment.

The impact of the usage of wikis from a teacher/student perspective in an educational context

The use of wiki tools in both personal as well as professional contexts has known a significant increase in the past few years, with some wiki-based applications reaching an enormous success at an international level. This paper provides an overview on the recent development of wiki technologies and, through the analysis of a survey, tries to determine what is the level of acceptance of wiki-based applications in a professional, academic environment, presenting several statistics collected from the answers to a survey. Also, some suggestions are presented, that may influence the future developments of wiki-related technologies and methodologies, in order to increase the productivity of Web based collaborative work.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE BASED ON A WI-FI REAL TIME POSITIONING ENGINE - A Practical Application in a Major Retail Company

Collecting relevant data to perform business intelligence on a real time basis has always been a crucial objective for managers responsible for economic activities on large spaces. Following this emergent need, the authors propose a platform to perform data gathering and analysis on the location of people and assets by automatic means. The developed system is retail business oriented and has a fairly distributed architecture. It couples the core elements of a real-time Wi-Fi based location system with a set of developed functional views so to better explicit the information that one can observe for each tracked entity, the undertaken path on the space, demographic concentration patterns. Tests were conducted on a real production environment as a partnership outcome with a major player in the retail sector and the obtained results were completely satisfactory having the managers confirmed the provided knowledge relevance.

DYNAMIC MULTIMEDIA ENVIRONMENT BASED ON REALTIME USER EMOTION ASSESSMENT - Biometric User Data towards Affective Immersive Environments

Both the academic and industry sectors have increased their attention and investment to the fields of Affective Computing and immersive digital environments, the latter imposing itself as a reliable domain, with increasingly cheaper hardware solutions. With all this in mind, the authors envisioned an immersive dynamic digital environment tied with automatic real-time user emotion assessment through biometric readings. The environment consisted in an aeronautical simulation, with internal variables such as flight plan, weather conditions and maneuver smoothness dynamically altered by the assessed emotional state of the user, based on biometric readings, including galvanic skin response, respiration rate and amplitude and phalange temperature. The results were consistent with the emotional states reported by the users, with a success rate of 78%.