Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Spotlight Talks: Sensing emotions in games

Today, physics drive game actions. Michael Zyda, USC Gamepipe Lab, says we want to get to the point where we can play emotionally cognoscente games. Hans Lee, CTO of EmSense Corp., demonstrates how.

Games like Second Life are based on social interaction. The communication beyond the words you say are important. Emotion sensing glasses sense if you’re happy, sad, engaged, relaxed. Avatars can reflect your emotions. Through a wireless connection, you can control the game by focusing on what you’re doing. Games like Doom3 could register your level of fear/engagement.

This tech can be applied to video games, professional training, and negotiation simulation. If you apply this model to learning tasks or negotiation skills, you can monitor emotional response to decision making, and see how users interact with the environment and respond to stress. Then you can train them to control those emotions by monitoring tension and relaxation. If you create a virtual mentor, it knows your emotional state. They know what’s hard or easy for you. You can allow software to teach people.

Zyda says that once you make emotion an input in the learning environment, you need to solve the problem of how to display that emotion, and how to draw the other characters so they appear to respond in appropriate ways. Applications for the EmSense sensors include learning, for game-based system that measure when students are engaged/not engaged. In the military, if you put soldiers in harms way, how do you train them to negotiate the dangers.

Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, says Second Life is a very dense virtual environment, originally characterized as a game. But as users began to trust the technology and environment, they began to do non-entertainment things.

Second life is like the internet, in that it’s made up of content people are building. They’re creating museums, teaching labs, and spaces to hang out and listen to music. They can look at photos and artwork, stream music and video, displayed on a virtual TV, and play recorded instructions for how do things, like use a telescope.

In this environment, anything is possible.