EU project develops affective interface technologies for new media
An EU-funded project is developing innovative multi modal affective interfaces within the field of new media and digital arts and entertainment. Named after the Greek opera singer Maria Callas, the Conveying Affectiveness in Leading-edge Living Adaptive Systems (CALLAS) project has already achieved important results in designing human computer interfaces which include emotional aspects. The project has been underway for one year. By focusing on the integration of new emotional models centred on a wide variety of sensations and emotions, the project aims to enhance the experience of the final user, whether situated in a public place or a theatre. These models for example will improve the experience by capturing the emotional state of the spectator and final user through a wide recognition of the facial characteristics and expressions they use when communicating. The thinking behind the project is that emotions, in all their expressions, have a fundamental role to play in the conditioning of natural communication between two people. Therefore, these must be copied when service based interfaces are developed to enhance the interaction between people and machines. For this reason, the affective interfaces developed by CALLAS cover a fundamental role in new media experiences such as digital theatre, interactive TV, augmented reality art and interactive public performances. As emotional multimodal interfaces aim at achieving the highest level of naturalness in human-computer interaction, one of the main challenges facing CALLAS is to implement the concept of affective emotional input for interactive media rather than within a traditional interface paradigm. Ultimately, the project will seek to demonstrate the real use of multimodal affective interfaces across a range of concrete applications. The four year project is funded by the EU's Sixth framework Programme (FP6) to the tune of €9.8 million.