DELEX: A DEep Learning Emotive eXperience: Investigating empathic HCI

Recent advances in Machine Learning have unveiled interesting possibilities for real-time investigating about user characteristics and expressions like, but not limited to, age, sex, body posture, emotions and moods. These new opportunities lay the foundations for new HCI tools for interactive applications that adopt user emotions as a communication channel. This paper presents an Emotion Controlled User Experience that changes according to user feelings and emotions analysed at runtime. Aiming at obtaining a preliminary evaluation of the proposed ecosystem, a controlled experiment has been performed in an engineering and software development company, where 60 people have been involved as volunteers. The subjective evaluation has been based on a standard questionnaire commonly adopted for measuring user perceived sense of immersion in Virtual Environments. The results of the controlled experiment encourage further investigations strengthen by the analysis of objective performance measurements and user physiological parameters.