Measurement of expression characteristics in emotional situations using virtual reality

Expressions are a basic necessity for daily living, as they are required for managing relationships with other people. Conventional expression training has difficulty achieving an objective measurement, because their assessment depends on the therapist's ability to assess a patient's state or training effectiveness. In addition, it is difficult to provide emotional and social situations in the same manner for each training or assessment session. Virtual reality techniques can overcome shortcomings occurring in conventional studies by providing exact and objective measurements and emotional and social situations. In this study, we developed a virtual reality prototype that could present emotional situation and measure expression characteristics. Although this is a preliminary study, it could be considered that this study shows the potential of virtual reality as an assessment tool. �� 2009 IEEE.This work was supported by the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF) grant funded by the Korea government (MOST) (No. R01-2007-000-11785-0). Appendix