Supporting children's social communication skills through interactive narratives with virtual characters

Abstract

The development of social communication skills in children relies on multimodal aspects of communication such as gaze, facial expression, and gesture. We introduce a multimodal learning environment for social skills which uses computer vision to estimate the children's gaze direction, processes gestures from a large multi-touch screen, estimates in real time the affective state of the users, and generates interactive narratives with embodied virtual characters. We also describe how the structure underlying this system is currently being extended into a general framework for the development of interactive multimodal systems.