Virtual environments design methodology for spontaneous facial expression elicitation.

Understanding emotion states at the level of populations had attracted the attention of marketing, security, safety and product design fields: knowing individuals feels could be useful to improve the characteristics of a product and to make it more satisfying for the user, in terms of its conceptualization and design or, from a scientific perspective, to fully understand economic and social phenomena. Navigating through a 3D virtual reality environment can be an effective way to elicit particular emotional states, therefore, the aim of this study was to exploit the exploration of virtual scenarios to reveal the emotional induction effect of the scenario on users.
 Through subjects involved in the experiment conducted at the 3D Lab of the Politecnico di Torino, in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano, we investigated the inner feedback of the users, taking advantage of face expression recognition system, to understand how the human face conveys meaningful information about the emotions aroused by the virtual environment, with the intent of designing affective virtual spaces able to arouse spontaneous (ecologically valid) emotions. The thesis was divided into three main phases: the study of the elements recognized in the literature, combining also a study of colours, geometries and sounds, valid to evoke emotions such as happiness, sadness and disgust; the development and design of five 3D scenarios through the Real-time Development Platform Unity; finally, the collection of data acquired through the facial capture system integrated with the results of the questionnaires that were administered at the end of the navigation of each scenario.