Interactive Testbed for Research in Autism : the SARA Project

The project SARA (Stylized Animations for Research on Autism) aims for a better understanding of the cognitive processes behind emotional categorization in children and adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD), in comparison to their neurotypically developed (NTD) peers. To this end, we combine novel real-time non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) algorithms, emotional facial animations, and eye tracking technologies in a framework that serves as an in- teractive testbed for empirical research. In this paper we focus on three experiments that: (1) validate real-time facial animations of virtual characters, (2) evaluate the NPR algorithms to create abstracted facial expressions, and (3) elucidate the relation between eye gaze behavior, ASD and alexithymia (i.e. difficulties in expressing ones emotions). The results show that our animations indeed can be used in the proposed experiments; however, more evaluation is needed regarding the NPR abstractions, es- pecially with individuals with ASD. Finally, even though no correlation was found between gaze behavior, ASD and alexithymia, the study opened several questions that will be addressed in our future work.publishe