Multimodal Affect Recognition in Virtual Worlds: Avatars Mirroring User´s Affect

Virtual worlds enable users´ interactions through avatars. Avatars embody individual characteristics from their owners and exhibit those characteristics outward to the community. Motivated by the role of avatars in interpersonal communication, we integrated a generic real-time multimodal affect recognition hub as an input within an online virtual world to make an avatar mirror its owner´s affect. Affect vectors (determined by pleasure, arousal, and dominance coordinates) in a continuous affective space are applied to characterize the user´s affective state in real time.