Does your profile say it all? Using demographics to predict expressive head movement during gameplay

In this work, we explore the relation between expressive head movement and user profile information in game play settings. Facial gesture analysis cues are statistically correlated with players’ demographic characteristics in two different settings, during game-play and at events of special interest (when the player loses during game play). Experiments were conducted on the Siren database, which consists of 58 participants, playing a modified version of the Super Mario. Here, as player demographics are considered the gender and age, while the statistical importance of certain facial cues (other than typical/universal facial expressions) was analyzed. The proposed analysis aims at exploring the option of utilizing demographic characteristics as part of users’ profiling scheme and interpreting visual behavior in a manner that takes into account those features.

[1]  P. Peer,et al.  Human skin color clustering for face detection , 2003, The IEEE Region 8 EUROCON 2003. Computer as a Tool..

[2]  W. IJsselsteijn,et al.  Exploring Behavioral Expressions of Player Experience in Digital Games , 2008 .

[3]  Ana Paiva,et al.  Automatic analysis of affective postures and body motion to detect engagement with a game companion , 2011, 2011 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[4]  Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier,et al.  Characterizing player's experience from physiological signals using fuzzy decision trees , 2010, Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[5]  Marko Turpeinen,et al.  Emotionally Adapted Games - An Example of a First Person Shooter , 2009, HCI.

[6]  Regan L. Mandryk,et al.  A fuzzy physiological approach for continuously modeling emotion during interaction with play technologies , 2007, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[7]  Kostas Karpouzis,et al.  Estimation of behavioral user state based on eye gaze and head pose—application in an e-learning environment , 2009, Multimedia Tools and Applications.

[8]  Simon Brown,et al.  Affective gaming: measuring emotion through the gamepad , 2003, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[9]  Nilanjan Sarkar,et al.  Maintaining Optimal Challenge in Computer Games through Real-Time Physiological Feedback , 2005 .

[10]  Paul A. Viola,et al.  Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2001.

[11]  Ana Paiva,et al.  Detecting user engagement with a robot companion using task and social interaction-based features , 2009, ICMI-MLMI '09.

[12]  Paul A. Cairns,et al.  Measuring and defining the experience of immersion in games , 2008, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[13]  Guillaume Chanel,et al.  Boredom, engagement and anxiety as indicators for adaptation to difficulty in games , 2008, MindTrek '08.

[14]  Ning Wang,et al.  Introducing EVG: An Emotion Evoking Game , 2006, IVA.

[15]  Ashish Kapoor,et al.  Automatic prediction of frustration , 2007, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[16]  Kostas Karpouzis,et al.  A Game-Based Corpus for Analysing the Interplay between Game Context and Player Experience , 2011, ACII.

[17]  Christos D. Katsis,et al.  Toward Emotion Recognition in Car-Racing Drivers: A Biosignal Processing Approach , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans.

[18]  Wijnand A. IJsselsteijn,et al.  Creating an Emotionally Adaptive Game , 2008, ICEC.

[19]  Guillaume Chanel,et al.  Emotion Assessment From Physiological Signals for Adaptation of Game Difficulty , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans.

[20]  U. Hess,et al.  The timing of appraisals. , 2007, Emotion.

[21]  Xue Yan,et al.  iCat: an animated user-interface robot with personality , 2005, AAMAS '05.

[22]  Kostas Karpouzis,et al.  Robust Feature Detection for Facial Expression Recognition , 2007, EURASIP J. Image Video Process..

[23]  In A. H. Fischer.  Emotional Episodes, Facial Expressions, and Reported Feelings in Human-computer Interactions , 1998 .

[24]  Howell O. Istance,et al.  For Your Eyes Only: Controlling 3D Online Games by Eye-Gaze , 2009, INTERACT.

[25]  Ioannis Pitas,et al.  Facial feature detection using distance vector fields , 2009, Pattern Recognit..

[26]  K. Scherer,et al.  Psychophysiological responses to appraisal dimensions in a computer game , 2004 .

[27]  Jonathan Klein,et al.  Frustrating the user on purpose: a step toward building an affective computer , 2002, Interact. Comput..

[28]  Kostas Karpouzis,et al.  Towards player’s affective and behavioral visual cues as drives to game adaptation , 2012 .