Mahmoud Neji¹and Mohamed Ben Ammar^2
1Faculté des Sciences Economiques et de Gestion, University of Sfax, Tunisia
²Superior institute of data processing and Management, University of Kairouan, Tunisia

This paper explores Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) for Affective e-Learning as an alternative communication technology potentially allowing interlocutors to express themselves emotionally in an efficient and effective way. Potential applications for such CVE systems are all areas where people cannot come together physically, but wish to discuss or collaborate on certain matters, for example in distance learning, based in the affective communication. Moreover, we will explore how the agents can communicate emotion. To investigate how emotions can efficiently and effectively be visualized in a CVE, an animated virtual head (Emotional Embodied Conversational Agent) was designed to express, the six universal emotions.

There are several novel elements to this research. Firstly, although CVEs as a technology have been available for more than a decade now, user representations are still rudimentary and their potential is not well explored, particularly the avatar as a device for social interaction. Secondly, the use of emotions to complement and indeed facilitate communication in CVEs is equally under-explored. This is partly because early CVE research was mainly technology driven, leaving aside the social and psychological aspects, and partly because the required computing, display and networking resources became available only recently. Thirdly, design guidelines for an efficient, effective, emotionally expressive avatar for real-time conversation did not exist prior to this research.

The multi-agent methodology can certainly bring several advantages to the development of e-Learning systems since it deals well with applications where such crucial issues (distance, cooperation among different entities and integration of different components of software) are found. As a result, multi-agent systems, together with technologies of networking and telecommunications, bring powerful resources to develop e-Learning systems. In this research work, we propose emotional frameworks for an intelligent emotional system. This system is called EMASPEL (Emotional Multi-Agents System for Peer to peer e-Learning), based on a multi-agents architecture.

Keywords: collaborative virtual environments, affective e-learning, affective communication, EMASPEL.

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