Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. SIGGRAPH Asia 2013, November 19 – 22, 2013, Hong Kong. Copyright © ACM 978-1-4503-2511-0/13/11 $15.00 The Next Generation Poetic Experience Diana Arellano * Institute of Animation Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg Volker Helzle † Institute of Animation Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg Figure 1: Examples of interaction with the animated characters (Installation shots). Abstract This paper presents the motivation, background and implementa- tion of The Muses of Poetry, an interactive installation that com- bines dynamically generated character animation, semantic analy- sis, natural voice interaction and affect in poetry. Inspired by the subjectivity and ethereal quality of this literary art, we wanted to enhance the act of reciting poetry by providing a set of characters the possibility to “understand” and manifest the emotional content of the poems through facial expressions and affective speech. We believe that this original installation will bring poetry closer to a wider audience, while creating a playful, interactive and surprising experience for the user. CR Categories: H.1.2 [Information Systems]: User/Machine Systems—Software psychology; H.5.1 [Information Systems]: Multimedia Information Systems—Animations; I.2.7 [Computing Methodologies]: Natural Language Processing —Speech recogni- tion and synthesis, Text analysis Keywords: human computer interaction, animated characters, af- fective computing 1 Introduction During the last three decades the interaction with computer gen- erated content has become a more natural and common thing to do. From the virtual characters usually exposed in kiosks at mu- seums and airports, to the latest technologies used in installations * e-mail:diana.arellano@filmakademie.de † e-mail:volker.helzle@filmakademie.de where the user embodies an avatar and sees the world through its eyes, human-computer interaction, or HCI has undergone a large number of improvements. The numerous researches in this area have intended to achieve more natural and better interaction, ob- taining successful results as in the case of Eva, a virtual geogra- phy teacher [Kasap et al. 2009]; the interactive football experts and moderator for the World Cup in Germany 2006 [Reithinger et al. 2006]; Max, the virtual museum guide who is in permanent exhibi- tion at the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum since 2004 [Pfeiffer et al. 2011]; and some other characters that have been used in more psy- chological and user experience experiments like MARC [Courgeon et al. 2009], Greta [Niewiadomski et al. 2009] or Alfred [Bee et al. 2009]. Poetry, for its part, is one of the most creative forms of literary expression. A good poem is not only capable of eliciting mental images and provoking feelings in the reader, but its rhythm and melody can transport this reader to the world created by the poet. This is reflected in the words of Emily Dickinson, who defined po- etry in the following way “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” (L342a, 1870). However, poetry has also gone through an interesting metamorpho- sis, not so much in its content as in its representation. The subjec- tive characteristic of this form of art has awaken the imagination of numerous artists over time, bringing poetry closer to a wider audi- ence. Media and interactive technologies have been often the ways in which poetry has been taken to new and fascinating levels, as de- scribed in Roberto Simanowski’s book, Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinectic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Inter- active Installations [Simanowski 2011]. In the book, Simanowski offers a semiotic analysis of different installations dealing with dig- ital poetry. The main objective of these installations was to find new ways of representing the meaning of the poems, or providing users with a new way of experiencing poetry. That is the case of Naoko Tosa’s MUSE [Tosa and Nakatsu 1998], where poems are created by exchanging poetic phrases between the user and the sys- tem; the latter being represented by a character which facial features are eyes, eyebrows and mouth. In Tosa’s work, the facial expres- sions of the character change according to the emotions conveyed in the phrases uttered by the user.