Emotional journey for an emotion provoking cycling exergame

Abstract

In this work we present a novel concept for affective entertainment, which we call Emotional Journey. It provides a dynamic and adaptive story path based on a player's emotional responses and yields improved accurate recognition of the player's emotions. We conducted a case study with 25 players to evaluate our concept using our cycling exercise machine. We evaluated three different journey types and two of the three types were recognized reliably by the participants. We introduce a real time multimodal analysis method for facial expressions and electrodermal activity (EDA) measurements. This method results in significantly more robust emotion recognition rates. Therefore our exergaming system is able to provoke emotions and adapt the game play to individual emotional reactions.