Emotional Augmentation in Virtual Environments

Dear Colleagues,

The advent of consumer grade virtual reality (VR) sets has popularized the using of this immersive technology in various fields, including gaming and entertainment, journalism, education, collaboration, communication, design, and engineering. In the VR the user may work in a solitary setting or interact with other users who are often visualised as avatars in a shared virtual environment. Use experience of a VR service or product may be enhanced by various forms of emotional augmentations. The user’s emotional state may be interpreted by the use of, for example, psychophysiological measurements or the analysis of voice or posture. This emotional information may be communicated back to the user for example in a training or therapy setting. On the other hand, emotions are social information that enhances interaction and collaboration effectiveness. In technology-mediated communication the affective information could be mediated as visual, auditory, or tactile cues to the other users. VR environments enable novel application of affective computing and technology-mediated social interaction. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to study not only the enabling technologies but also the related psychological and other human-related effects.

For this special issue, contributions are invited from different fields related to emotional augmentation in virtual reality. Submissions can be empirical studies, reviews, or theoretical research. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: interpretation of the user’s emotional state in VR, visualizing or mediating the user’s emotional information in VR, and the effects of mediated emotional information on the user’s behaviour and perceptions in VR.

Dr. Mikko Salminen
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Emotional augmentation
• Affective computing
• Bio-adaptation
• Biofeedback
• Virtual reality
• Digital games
• Socio-affective cues
• Social interaction
• Collaboration
• Emotions
• Affect detection
• Touch-based interaction
• Psychophysiology
• Human-avatar interaction
• Technology-mediated communication