Physiologically interactive gaming with the 3D agent Max

Becker C, Nakasone A, Prendinger H, Ishizuka M, Wachsmuth I. Physiologically interactive gaming with the 3D agent Max. Presented at the JSAI 2005 Workshop on Conversational Informatics in conjunction with the 19th Annual Conference of the Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence.Physiologically interactive (or affective) gaming refers to research on the evocation and detection of emotion during game play [21]. In this paper, we first describe the two building blocks of our approach to affective gaming. The building blocks correspond to two independently conducted research strands on affective human–computer interaction: one on an emotion simulation system for an expressive 3D humanoid agent called Max, which was designed at the University of Bielefeld [13, 2]; the other one on a real-time system for empathic (agent) feedback that is based on human emotional states derived from physiological information, and developed at the University of Tokyo and the National Institute of Informatics [19]. Then, the integration of both systems is motivated in the setting of a cards game called Skip-Bo that is played by a human game partner and Max. Physiological user information is used to enable empathic feedback through non-verbal behaviors of the humanoid agent Max. With regard to the new area of Conversational Informatics we discuss the measurement of human physiological activity in game interactions and non-verbal agent behavior