A Wild Evaluation of Users' Emotional Engagement

INTRODUCTION The research field of affective computing [7] has been a huge inspiration source for this work, however, being more interested in experiences than efficiency we want to give users a more active role in interacting with such systems. While automatic capturing of users’ emotional state has been the most prominent approach within affective computing we instead want to place users very much in the center of a communicational experience. Letting users be engage with and experience their emotions both on a cognitive and a physical level we believe we can create richer emotional experiences for the user. Similarly to an engaging real life conversation where body language and ambiguous emotional expressions are very much a part of what is interesting and appealing with such conversation we want to create an interaction model where the system in a way play the part of an emotionally intelligent conversation partner, similarly to Romero and Mateas ideas of an alien presence [8]. We want our systems to some extent recognize users’ emotional expressions but also influence and reinforce expressed emotions. We want the user to be engaged in an affective loop experience with the system, where she gets more and more involved in exploring and interacting with her own emotional state.