Enabling Multimodal Emotionally-Aware Ecosystems Through a W3C-Aligned Generic Interaction Modality

Emotions play a key role in our life experiences. In interactive systems, the user’s emotional state can be relevant to provide increased levels of adaptation to the user, but can also be paramount in scenarios where such information might enable us to help users manage and express their emotions (e.g., anxiety), with a positive impact on their daily life and on how they interact with others. However, although there is a clear potential for emotionally-aware applications, they still have a long road to travel to reach the desired potential and availability. This is mostly due to the still low translational nature of the research in affective computing, and to the lack of straightforward, off-the-shelf methods for easy integration of emotion in applications without the need for developers to master the different concepts and technologies involved. In light of these challenges, we advance our previous work and propose an extended conceptual vision for supporting emotionally-aware interactive ecosystems and a fast track to ensure the desired translational nature of the research in affective computing. This vision then leads to the proposal of an improved iteration of a generic affective modality, a key resource to the accomplishment of the proposed vision, enabling off-the-shelf support for emotionally-aware applications in multimodal interactive contexts.