Making child's play of emotional development
The project focuses on Personal and Social Education by using virtual dramas created by interaction between intelligent virtual agents as a means of dealing with education for children aged 8-12. In particular, VICTEC considered the application of 3D animated synthetic characters and emergent narrative to create improvised dramas to address bullying problems. The FearNot! application software (Fun with Empathic Agents to Achieve Novel Outcomes in Teaching) developed during the project aimed to enable children to explore issues surrounding bullying. It also aimed at coping strategies for conflict resolution. The FearNot! Application allows children to be exposed to bullying scenarios in a safe school-based Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), promoting engagement and believability with synthetic characters in a social interaction. In this process, what is of primary importance is the empathic engagement between the child and the synthetic characters. SenToy is a large, soft, doll-shaped toy equipped with sensors in the arms, legs and body, allowing the user to influence the emotions of her character in a game. Children are able to make gestures, which are picked up by the sensors and interpreted as an emotional state, from a small set of five or six emotional states. In order to adapt SenToy in the purposes of the VICTEC project, rather than the usual gaming needs, a face was added to the FearNot! Interface. With this the child user could convey an emotional commentary on the action-taking place in FearNot! In this way, it became possible to capture not just the final feelings of the child but also to record any changes as the story progresses. This idea gave rise to another interesting use of the SenToy, expressing theory of mind capabilities. In such a case the child user express how they feel a character is feeling instead of expressing their own feelings. The FearNot! Demonstrator represents an intuitive interface between the virtual world and the child user. SenToy has been applied as a novel interaction technique, positively received by end users, which still has a number of exciting unexplored research areas.
