Neu-Noumena – Emotion BCI

“Neo-Noumena” is a novel communicative neuroresponsive system that uses brain-computer interfacing (BCI), augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to read one’s emotional states to dynamically represent them to others through head-mounted displays. Allowing to communicate one’s emotion is notoriously difficult, a fact that most people, especially when living together such as couples, can probably easily agree with. We believe that systems such as Neo-Noumena could help with that.

Neo-Noumena is novel AI-driven AR system to communicate emotions.

Through an in-the-wild study were volunteers wore the system for several days, we found that participants used the system to talk about how they feel. They also applauded that the system allowed them to understand better how their partner felt, enabling to respond more appropriately. Furthermore, we found that measures of emotional competence demonstrated a statistically significant increase in the participants’ ability to interpersonally regulate emotions.

Neo-Noumena’s architecture

With our work, we show how to design interactive technology to help people be more “in tune” with their emotions as well as understand and respond to other’s feelings better. This can be useful for anybody who ever found it difficult to express how they felt; one interesting avenue for future work could be investigations with people on the autism spectrum. We see a future where our ability to communicate emotion is augmented beyond traditional experience.

Publications

Semertzidis, N., Scary, M., Andres, J., Dwivedi, B., Kulwe, Y., Zambetta, F., Mueller, F. Neo-Noumena: Augmenting Emotion Communication. CHI 2020. Long paper. ACM. VideoTalk video.

Semertzidis, N., Scary, M., Andres, J., Kulwe, Y., Dwivedi, B., Zambetta, F., Mueller, F. Neo-Noumena. CHI 2020 Interactivity. ACM.

Acknowledgements

We thank all our participants for their enthusiasm, insights and time. We also appreciate the support of the School of Design at RMIT University, Australia.