Nadia Berthouze: Body Movement as a Modality for Affective Human-Computer Interaction
Whitehead Lecture: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:00:00 GMTDr. Nadia Berthouze, UCLIC, University College London, UK
In recent years, we are assisting to the emergence of technology that involves and requires its user to be engaged through their body. This has opened the possibility to better exploit and understand this modality to capture, respond to and regulate the affective experience of its user. We report on our studies aimed at using such modality to induce and recognize affective states in users interacting with technology. In the first part, I will show that technology can capture the quality of experience in its user. I will present a system that dynamically learns to recognize the affective state of people from their posture. While successful experiments have been carried out with acted postures, we are currently testing the system’s ability to detect the more subtle affective states of a computer game player. In the second part of the talk, I will present a model of body movement as a modulator of the experience of the player. Through experiment results, I will show that game controllers affording natural body movements can change the quality of engagement of the player and can induce a more emotional experience.BRIEF BIO: Since 2006 Nadia Berthouze is a lecturer in the UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC) at the University of London, a Centre in Human-Computer Interaction. After her PhD (1995) in Computer Science and Bio-medicine at the University of Milan (Italy), she spent 5 years first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a COE fellow at the Electrotechnical Laboratory (Tsukuba in Japan) where she investigated HCI aspects in the area of Multimedia information interpretation with a focus on the interpretation of affective content. In 2000, she was appointed as lecturer at the Computer Software Department of the University of Aizu in Japan where she extended her interest in emotion expression to the study of non-verbal affective communication. The premise of her research is that affect, emotion, and subjective experience should be factored into the design of interactive technology. At the centre of her research is the creation of interactive systems that exploit body movement as a medium to induce, recognize and measure the quality of experience of humans. She is investigating the various factors involved in the way body movement is used to express and experience emotions, including cross-cultural differences and task context. She was awarded a 2-year International Marie Curie Reintegration Grant (AffectME) to investigate these issues in the clinical domain and in the gaming industry. In the area of clinical domain, she is investigating how to design technology that supports self-directed rehabilitation in chronic muscle-skeleton pain. In the area of computer games, she is investigating how an increase in task-related body movement imposed, or allowed, by the game controller affects the player’s game experience.