Development of an affective database made of interactive virtual environments.

Despite the great potential of Virtual Reality (VR) to arouse emotions, there are no VR affective databases available as it happens for pictures, videos, and sounds. In this paper, we describe the validation of ten affective interactive Virtual Environments (VEs) designed to be used in Virtual Reality. These environments are related to five emotions. The testing phase included using two different experimental setups to deliver the overall experience. The setup did not include any immersive VR technology, because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but the VEs were designed to run on stereoscopic visual displays. We collected measures related to the participants' emotional experience based on six discrete emotional categories plus neutrality and we included an assessment of the sense of presence related to the different experiences. The results showed how the scenarios can be differentiated according to the emotion aroused. Finally, the comparison between the two experimental setups demonstrated high reliability of the experience and strong adaptability of the scenarios to different contexts of use.

Affective Virtual Reality: How to Design Artificial Experiences Impacting Human Emotions.

Computer graphics is-in many cases-about visualizing what you cannot see. However, virtual reality (VR), from its beginnings, aimed at stimulating all human senses: not just the visual channel. Moreover, this set of multisensory stimuli allows users to feel present and able to interact with the virtual environment. In this way, VR aims to deliver experiences that are comparable to real-life ones in their level of detail and stimulation, intensity, and impact. Hence, VR is not only a means to see, but also to feel differently. With the spreading of VR technologies, there is a growing interest in using VR to evoke emotions, including positive and negative ones. This article discusses the current possibilities and the authors' experience collected in the field in trying to elicit emotions through VR. It explores how different design aspects and features can be used, describing their contributions and benefits in the development of affective VR experiences. This work aims at raising awareness of the necessity to consider and explore the full design space that VR technology provides in comparison to traditional media. Additionally, it provides possible tracks of VR affective applications, illustrating how they could impact our emotions and improve our life, and providing guidelines for their development.

Optimal marker set assessment for motion capture of 3D mimic facial movements.

Nowadays, facial mimicry studies have acquired a great importance in the clinical domain and 3D motion capture systems are becoming valid tools for analysing facial muscles movements, thanks to the remarkable developments achieved in the 1990s. However, the face analysis domain suffers from a lack of valid motion capture protocol, due to the complexity of the human face. Indeed, a framework for defining the optimal marker set layout does not exist yet and, up to date, researchers still use their traditional facial point sets with manually allocated markers. Therefore, the study proposes an automatic approach to compute a minimum optimized marker layout to be exploited in facial motion capture, able to simplify the marker allocation without decreasing the significance level. Specifically, the algorithm identifies the optimal facial marker layouts selecting the subsets of linear distances among markers that allow to automatically recognizing with the highest performances, through a k-nearest neighbours classification technique, the acted facial movements. The marker layouts are extracted from them. Various validation and testing phases have demonstrated the accuracy, robustness and usefulness of the custom approach.