Enhancing Emotional Experience by Building Emotional Virtual Characters in VR Exhibitions

Abstract

Virtual digital exhibitions attract public attention as they can provide an immersive aesthetic experience augmented by virtual reality (VR) technologies. However, since each visitor is placed in an isolated virtual environment while using VR devices, the exhibitions lose the immediate emotional perception between visitors. In order to enable visitors to perceive the communicative value of the digital exhibitions, increasing the user’s feeling of immersion and engagement in the virtual environment is crucial. Existing experience designs of VR exhibitions put more effort into developing the imitation of physical exhibited space, rather than display instant emotional facial expressions of visitors. Thus, a supporting system design on how to enhance the visitor’s real-time emotional communication in the VR exhibitions experience is needed at present. An emotional color label of visitors in exhibitions and an emotaion recognition and display model in the virtual environment are proposed to alleviate this issue. Our research has the potential to enhance the user’s emotional experience and engagement in VR exhibitions and other forms of virtual digital exhibition.