Ningbo Intelligent Manufacturing Industry Research Institute

A visualization method of users' emotion information is proposed for long distance interaction such as telecommuting and distance learning, where 3D emotion vectors in Affinity Pleasure-Arousal space are illustrated by using shape-brightness-size (SBS) figure. It gives users easily understandable emotional profile information and provides administrator strategic suggestion to improve the interaction between the users and the system. A distance education system is designed based on fuzzy inference, where visualized atmosphere information is shared by all learners in a virtual classroom. It provides high aspirations, low isolated feeling, low stress, and high affinity to learners, and offers learner's psychological information, individual difference information, and hints of system improvement to system managers. For visualizing emotional information, two experiments between 7 basic emotions and 7 SBS figures for 8 subjectsaredone,83.93% matching is achieved, and the administrator finds contents improvement hint in the questionnaire of emotions for 5 reading-text-tasks by 8 subjects. It is planning to be implemented in a language learning application to provide a more comfortable learning experience by contents selection based on user's emotion. The effect of visualized atmosphere information to learner's psychological states is confirmed by T score Anger-Hostility (A-H) of POMS test for 15 graduate students using CAI contents, and comparison experiment with traditional distance education in terms of paired t-test obtains p-value 0.011 of A-H. The proposal of atmosphere information presentation of virtual classroom provides a first step of establishing over face-to-face distance education system.