As the student walks towards the computer it responds by organising the interface to the student's liking. The student asks the computer to set up a new program and whilst completing the task the computer and the student talk about the latest news and gossip. As the student begins to find studies difficult, the program slows itself down with a wider variety of information presented to demonstrate each point. The computer calmly encourages the student by highlighting the progress made and upon completion of the task congratulates the student warmly.

A child watches a TV programme that presents a dilemma for the main character. The child begins a verbal conversation with her toy about the problem and when she suggests an idea, the toy discusses possible outcomes. After a short conversation, the child explains her final decision and the program continues following her suggestion. The child then observes the consequences of her suggested action and discusses further with her toy alternate solutions to the dilemma.

The Futurelab Innovations Workshops are designed to bring together experts from research, practice and the creative industries to investigate how technology can impact upon learning in 5, 10, and 15 years' time. This workshop focused upon how technologies that mimic, react to and/or create emotional responses could be developed to aid learning. The workshop provided an opportunity for these diverse groups to share their understanding from their own professional perspectives so to create a variety of scenarios of the future possibilities of learning technologies.


Current technology

Emotion technologies fall largely into three areas of research and development, investigating the potential for technologies to: respond to human emotion (emotion recognition), stimulate human emotion (emotion generation) and represent human-like emotion (emotion simulation). The overarching term, affective computing, describes technologies that relate to emotions.

There are many examples of emotion technologies but relatively few, at present, that have a direct correlation to formal education. Examples of emotion technology looked at during the workshop were MIT's Kismet, a robot that reacts to tone of voice and body movement; bot technology (such as ALICE and Jabberwacky), that attempts to replicate human communication; Sony's Aibo that creates emotional reactions in users; and Automatic Speech Recognition technologies that respond to verbal inputs but that can also act depending upon the emotional state of the user. At present these technologies have a limited relationship with educational practice, but the potential for these to develop into useful learning tools is emerging.

Examples of emotion technologies that are being developed specifically for learning situations are VICTEC, which allows investigation of bullying issues through the use of empathetic virtual characters; MediaStage, a virtual studio in which you can assign emotions to characters; and Personal Investigator, a therapeutic game for adolescents.


Key themes

Many of the conversations during the day revolved around the issues of emotional literacy and risk-free role-play. It is widely understood that emotion is at the base of decision making, whether rational or impulsive. With this in mind, the discussion turned to how simulating and recognising emotions of the users could help the development of emotional literacy and the way in which emotions affect actions. The discussion about risk-free role-play came directly from this theme. Could a technology be designed that would allow users to play out simulations, take on different roles within a community, make difficult decisions and observe their consequences in a safe risk-free environment?

Further potential for emotion technologies can be seen when considering simulations of actions: demonstrating anger and upset when investigating bullying, or a system that rewards effort with gentle persuasion. Currently, schools develop these skills through drama and role-play. The benefit of technology in this area is that even timid students have the opportunity to author, act, direct and observe activities and that schools that have little space for drama can become involved.

Immersive environments are those where students can become highly motivated and focused upon a task due to the (created) environment - whether that be due to the impact of modes of communication - such as sound, image, text or environment - or whether that be due to the response given to the user's action. Through discussion during and after the workshop, it became evident that in order to create an immersive environment, the user must be able to invest their emotions with the activity: be able to suspend disbelief without fear of embarrassment. This has implications for the environment in which such technologies are used.


Technology on the horizon

To consider the potential for learning, investigation was made of developing emotional technologies. For example:

• appliances that read/acknowledge facial expressions
• emotions-rich simulated environments
• search engines that find music, video and images based upon emotional content
• appliances that chat with you in natural language, helping information retrieval, searching and creating an alternative method of presenting ideas
• avatars that converse with learners
• software that reacts to users' own emotional state to present relevant information in an appropriate style
• modelling appropriate and inappropriate responses in simulated situations
• enabling the learner to experience emotions within a simulated environment.