ElectroEmotion — A tool for producing emotional corpora collaboratively

Emotion-aware applications supporting natural interaction are currently still a vision. One difficulty in developing these applications is the lack of multimodal corpora suitable for multiple use contexts, such as public spaces. Here, we introduce ElectroEmotion, a research tool prototype for collecting vocal and gestural corpora in novel contexts collaboratively. ElectroEmotion concept includes a public walk-up-and-use interface that allows users to produce multimodal expressions in an interactive environment. We describe the design of this system and report an experimental study, which evaluated the importance of inducting emotion and social influences in corpus acquisition. This preliminary investigation involved 12 users. By performing a video-based interaction analysis, we found that the participants demonstrated spontaneous multimodal activity and more distinctively emotional expressions in response to the emotion induction procedure. Social learning through examples provided by the experimenter influenced the way the subjects interacted. From these observations, we believe that the proposed concept could be developed into a functional system that can help to produce emotional corpora.