Conveying Affectiveness in Leading-edge Living Adaptive Systems

Emotion is at the heart of human-to-human communication. Traditional media (films, books, live music) thrive on conveying emotion, but always limited to a one-way expressiveness conveying, with a merely passive role for the user. On the other hand New Media has so far failed to realise the potential for truly interactive, two-way emotional communication. Now it is the time for New Media to unleash some challenging yet partially unexplored potentialities for allowing a more pervasive, natural, participatory and active interaction with the user. CALLAS aims to define and develop a multimodal architecture including emotional aspects, to support experiments and re-use and targeting new media applications essentially in an ambient intelligence paradigm. One of the most important factor for human emotional interaction is space, where this interaction takes place. For this reason the scenarios chosen for CALLAS are all relevant different typologies of space: theatres, home, squares, festivals etc. CALLAS goal is to bridge the gap between the emerging capacity of conveying emotional aspects within multi modal interaction and the growing expectations of people for more natural and pervasive interaction with digital media applications in intelligent adaptive spaces. These spaces are organised in three main categories, namely:� Public close space, as a theatre in the digital theatre scenarios� Private close space home space in the interactive TV scenario � Public open space, as a city square, in the last scenarios. Therefore in the light of the CALLAS vision the project aims at ambitious challenges: - to be the industrial application model for emotional and multi-modal interface components - to advance the State of the art in multi-modal Interfaces for New Media Applications - to design a methodological quality process to make possible an easy replication of its results - to reduce dramatically the costs for developing multi-modal interfaces