Designing for a Rich Emotional Journey through a Game of Riddles Called EmRoll Farnaz Zangouie, Mohammad Ali Babazadeh Gashti, Kristina Höök*, Tim Tijs**, Gert-Jan de Vries**, and Joyce Westerink** Royal Institute of Technology Forum 100, 16440 Kista, Sweden {zangouei,mabg}@kth.se *Mobile Life @ Stockholm University Forum 100, 16440 Kista, Sweden kiah@mobilelifecentre.org **Philips Research 5656, Eindhoven, The Netherlands { tim.tijs, gj.de.vries joyce.westerink}@philips.com ABSTRACT During last few years we have designed several systems to involve users emotionally through physical movements. In our recent work, we wanted to take the prior works one step further and make use of a combination of movement capture-sensors and bio-sensors, actively involving users’ emotional experiences. We have designed a game named EmRoll stands for Emotional Rollercoaster that poses riddles to pairs of players. The riddles can only be solved if the players are, or at least pretend to be, moving according to different emotional states (happy dancing, relaxed breathing and scared reactions). We pick up on movement, breathing and sweat from the two players. Author Keywords Affective loop, designing for experience, full body interaction, body tracking, biological sensors ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2 Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION Research in Neuroscience and Neuropsychology states that physical and cognitive assessment of a situation can aid modulate the emotions which turned out in a subconscious way [2]. Therefore for a powerful emotional experience, both physical and cognitive aspects of emotions need to be addressed [6]. Intense emotional experiences often involve our whole bodies [5]. The emotional involvement through physical movement, we have tried to capture by the idea of an affective loop. Affective Loop is an interaction process where user first expresses her emotion through body gestures or manipulation of an artifact. The system then gives feedback by generating affective expressions. The generated affective feedback of the system affects the user both physically and cognitively, and motivates her to respond affectively. Step by step this interaction feedback cycle amplifies the user’s emotional states and makes her more and more involved with the system. To design this game, we embarked on an iterative user- centered design journey where we created a game named EmRoll (Emotional Rollercoaster) that bases its interaction on bodily movement, respiration rate and spontaneous GSR frequency [1]. EMROLL EmRoll is an affective multiplayer game mainly designed in Adobe Flash CS4 and programmed with Java and Action Script 3. EmRoll is played by pairs of kids, 8-12 years old. They dress up in the costumes that can be seen in (Figure 1, top). Figure1: (top) Players put on white costume with colored markers on their head, one hand and one leg. By means of two cameras their movements are captured. (Bottom) Each player has control over half of this two headed avatar. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-60558-246-7/09/04...$5.00.