The SARA Project: An Interactive Sandbox for Research on Autism

SARA is an ongoing research project that investigates in a novel and artistic way the causes for social communication and emotion recognition deficits in children and adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The novelty of our work resides in the real-time generation and parameterization of emotional facial expressions of virtual characters by means of speed, intensity and abstraction, the latter achieved by non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) techniques. Although the project is currently in an ongoing phase, it shows the potential of using virtual characters and real-time techniques for interactive experiments, which otherwise would be impossible using “linear stimuli” (e.g. pre-rendered animations).