Towards a platform for the education in emotion modeling based on virtual environments Michal Bída, Cyril Brom Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Dept. of Software and Computer Science Education, Prague, Czech Republic. michal.bida@seznam.cz, brom@ksvi.mff.cuni.cz Abstract. The emotion modeling is a wide, multifaceted theme attracting many scientists. Many different projects focus on different aspects of emotions. What has not been studied in a greater depth is the education in the field of emotion modeling itself. We believe that the time has come to establish a platform that would enable learn-by-example education in this field. This position paper presents our aim at creating a software toolkit facilitating the basic education of event appraisal and emotion modeling in virtual environments. This toolkit is presently being built upon the platform Pogamut 2 used for education of undergraduate students in the field of virtual agents control. Keywords: Emotions, virtual agents, education. 1 Introduction Emotions play an important role in human behavior [1]. Due to their ambiguous nature, there are number of ways they can be studied. In recent years there has been a growing interest in emotion modeling in virtual environments. Emotions serve a number of purposes here – from increasing believability or performance of virtual agents to the simulation of some real world scenarios for learning purposes [2]. The role of emotions in virtual agents is not clear-cut. Emotions can affect decision making [3], expressive part of agents’ behavior [4] or just serve the agent as another source of information when interacting with humans [5]. So far just a little attention has been given to the education in the field of emotion modeling itself. Especially – as far as we know – there is no platform that would facilitate the education in this field. In our previous work we have created an educational platform Pogamut 2 [6]. This platform is fully developed and is being used as a tool for education of undergraduate computer science students at Charles University in Prague in the field of modeling behavior of virtual agents. Pogamut 2 enables simple way of prototyping virtual agents in the virtual world of 3D action game Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT04) [7]. In UT04 the player can see the 3D environment through the eyes of the avatar he or she is currently controlling. The 3D environment of UT04 can be very realistic (Fig. 1). Although UT04 is an action game, its environment can be easily exploited for “peaceful” scenarios. The established university course that uses platform Pogamut 2 concerns also problematics of emotion modeling. So far the education in this field was just