HCI evaluation methods are useful for improving the design of interactive systems, yet they may be rejected by nontraditional technology disciplines such as media art. We have developed a two-tiered evaluation model that responds to the concerns of interactive artists and have used it to improve the design of an interactive artwork, the Influencing Machine, exploring issues in affective computing. The method was interpretive, focusing on giving the artists a grounded feeling for how the machine was interpreted and their message was communicated. We describe the resulting design of the Influencing Machine and the reactions of users. The study itself is part of the art piece - together these activities achieve the goal of the artists: to provoke our cultural notions of whether a machine can "have emotions".

In this paper we describe a way of controlling the emotional states of a synthetic character in a game (FantasyA) through a tangible interface named SenToy. SenToy is a doll with sensors in the arms, legs and body, allowing the user to influence the emotions of her character in the game. The user performs gestures and movements with SenToy, which are picked up by the sensors and interpreted according to a scheme found through an initial Wizard of Oz study. Different gestures are used to express each of the following emotions: anger, fear, happiness, surprise, sadness and gloating. Depending upon the expressed emotion, the synthetic character in FantasyA will, in turn, perform different actions. The evaluation of SenToy acting as the interface to the computer game FantasyA has shown that users were able to express most of the desired emotions to influence the synthetic characters, and that overall, players, especially children, really liked the doll as an interface.

Game development is an emerging area of development for new types of interaction between computers and humans. New forms of communication are now being explored there, influenced not only by face to face communication but also by recent developments in multi-modal communication and tangible interfaces. This demo will feature a computer game, FantasyA, where users can play the game by interacting with a tangible interface, SenToy (see Figure 1). The main idea is to involve objects and artifacts from real life into ways to interact with systems, and in particular with games. So, SenToy is an interface for users to project some of their emotional gestures through moving the doll in certain ways. This device would establish a link between the users (holding the physical device) and a controlled avatar (embodied by that physical device) of the computer game, FantasyA.