A novel approach to express emotions through a flock of virtual beings

This paper proposes and explores a novel approach to express emotions in cyberworlds through a flock of virtual beings. Emotions are represented in terms of the arousal and valence dimensions and they are visually expressed in a simple way through the behaviour and appearance of the individuals in the flock. In particular, the arousal value parameterizes the Reynolds´ flocking algorithm, and the valence value determines the number of different colors in the flock. Furthermore, the paper describes a study with users, whose interesting results are also discussed.