Physiologically Interactive Gaming with the 3D Agent Max⋆

Physiologically interactive (or affective) gaming refers to research on the evocation and detection of emotion during game play [21]. In this paper, we first describe the two building blocks of our approach to affective gaming. The building blocks correspond to two independently conducted research strands on affective human–computer interaction: one on an emotion simulation system for an expressive 3D humanoid agent called Max, which was designed at the University of Bielefeld [13, 2]; the other one on a real-time system for empathic (agent) feedback that is based on human emotional states derived from physiological information, and developed at the University of Tokyo and the National Institute of Informatics [19]. Then, the integration of both systems is motivated in the setting of a cards game called Skip-Bo that is played by a human game partner and Max. Physiological user information is used to enable empathic feedback through non-verbal behaviors of the humanoid agent Max. With regard to the new area of Conversational Informatics we discuss the measurement of human physiological activity in game interactions and non-verbal agent behavior.