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The SARA Project: An Interactive Sandbox for Research on Autism

Published: 07 September 2015 Publication History

Abstract

SARA is an ongoing research project that investigates in a novel and artistic way the causes for social communication and emotion recognition deficits in children and adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The novelty of our work resides in the real-time generation and parameterization of emotional facial expressions of virtual characters by means of speed, intensity and abstraction, the latter achieved by non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) techniques. Although the project is currently in an ongoing phase, it shows the potential of using virtual characters and real-time techniques for interactive experiments, which otherwise would be impossible using "linear stimuli" (e.g. pre-rendered animations).

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S. Alves, A. Marques, C. Queirós, and V. Orvalho. LIFEisGAME prototype: A serious game about emotions for children with autism spectrum disorders. PsychNology Journal, 11(3):191--211, 2013.
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J. C. Hidalgo. Ciudades en azul en el día del autismo, April 2015. El País. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/Yzqdw6.
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Interacción '15: Proceedings of the XVI International Conference on Human Computer Interaction
September 2015
287 pages
ISBN:9781450334631
DOI:10.1145/2829875
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or 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 the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 September 2015

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Author Tags

  1. Autism Spectrum Disorder
  2. Facial Expressions
  3. Interaction
  4. Non-Photorealistic Rendering
  5. Real-time Animation

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  • Short-paper
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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  • German Research Foundation (DFG)

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Interacción '15

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Overall Acceptance Rate 109 of 163 submissions, 67%

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