Authoring Emotion

It is wide accepted that emotion “guides perception, increases the selectivity of attention, helps determine the content of working memory, in sum, it motivate, organize and sustain particular sets of behaviours ” (Izard e Ackerman, 2000:254). Therefore, emotion is a very powerful strategy to achieve the attention and the information retention of other people with whom we communicate. In fields as Entertainment, it is important for the creation of engagement with fiction because it strongly depends of the interest and attention of the viewers (Plantinga, 1999). Also in fields as Education, Health and Security, in which it is important to have people alertness and memorising new inputs, it is also highly relevant to catch attention of users. Examples as teaching how to follow health prescriptions; teaching difficult/boring matters; or teaching how we must react in emergencies demonstrates the need to have emotion authoring tools accessible and easy to use by people with little technology skills. In this chapter, we will discuss the development of a plug-in for two authoring tools: Inscape1 and Teatrix2. The plug-in aims at helping authors to easily create virtual interactive stories that explore the emotional dimension of characters and scenes in order to contribut