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is an open access repository that collects the work of Arts et Métiers ParisTech researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. This is an author-deposited version published in: https://sam.ensam.eu Handle ID: .http://hdl.handle.net/10985/12194 To cite this version :Jérôme GUEGAN, Stéphanie BUISINE, Fabrice MANTELET, Nicolas MARANZANA, Frédéric SEGONDS -Avatar-mediated creativity: When embodying inventors makes engineers more creative -Avatar-mediated creativity: When embodying inventors makes engineers more creative a b s t r a c tAn important challenge today is to support creativity while enabling geographically distant people to work together. In line with the componential theory of creativity, self-perception theory and recent research on the Proteus Effect, we investigate how avatars, which are virtual representations of the self, may be a medium for stimulating creativity. For this purpose, we conducted two studies with a population of engineering students. In the first study, 114 participants responded to online surveys in order to identify what a creative avatar may look like. This enabled us to select avatars representing inventors, which were perceived as creative by engineering students, and neutral avatars. In the second study, 54 participants brainstormed in groups of 3, in 3 different conditions: in a control face-to-face situation, in a virtual environment while embodying neutral avatars and in a virtual environment with inventor avatars. The results show that inventor avatars led to higher performance in fluency and originality of ideas. Moreover, this benefit proved to endure over time since participants allocated to inventor avatars also performed better in a subsequent face-to-face brainstorming. The prospects of using avatars for enhancing creativity-relevant processes are discussed in terms of theoretical and applicative implications.

is an open access repository that collects the work of Arts et Métiers ParisTech researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. ABSTRACTAssistive Technologies are specialized products aiming to partly compensate for the loss of autonomy experienced by disabled people. Because they address special needs in a highly-segmented market, they are often considered as niche products. To improve their design and make them tend to Universality, we propose the EMFASIS framework (Extended Modularity, Functional Accessibility, and Social Integration Strategy). We first elaborate on how this strategy conciliates niche and Universalist views, which may appear conflicting at first sight. We then present three examples illustrating its application for designing Assistive Technologies: the design of an overbed table, an upper-limb powered orthose and a powered wheelchair. We conclude on the expected outcomes of our strategy for the social integration and participation of disabled people.

is an open access repository that collects the work of Arts et Métiers ParisTech researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. This paper examines some aspects of the usefulness of interactive tabletop systems, if and how these impact collaboration. We chose creative problem solving such as brainstorming as an application framework to test several collaborative media: the use of pen-and-paper tools, the ''around-the-table'' form factor, the digital tabletop interface, the attractiveness of interaction styles. Eighty subjects in total (20 groups of four members) participated in the experiments. The evaluation criteria were task performance, collaboration patterns (especially equity of contributions), and users' subjective experience. The ''aroundthe-table'' form factor, which is hypothesized to promote social comparison, increased performance and improved collaboration through an increase of equity. Moreover, the attractiveness of the tabletop device improved subjective experience and increased motivation to engage in the task. However, designing attractiveness seems a highly challenging issue, since overly attractive interfaces may distract users from the task.

Until now, research on arrangement of verbal and non-verbal information in multimedia presentations has not considered multimodal behavior of animated agents. In this paper, we will present an experiment exploring the effects of different types of speech-gesture cooperation in agents' behavior: redundancy (gestures duplicate pieces of information conveyed by speech), complementarity (distribution of information across speech and gestures) and a control condition in which gesture does not convey semantic information. Using a Latin-square design, these strategies were attributed to agents of different appearances to present different objects. Fifty-four male and 54 female users attended three short presentations performed by the agents, recalled the content of presentations and evaluated both the presentations and the agents. Although speech-gesture cooperation was not consciously perceived, it proved to influence users' recall performance and subjective evaluations: redundancy increased verbal information recall, ratings of the quality of explanation, and expressiveness of agents. Redundancy also resulted in higher likeability scores for the agents and a more positive perception of their personality. Users' gender had no influence on this set of results.

is an open access repository that collects the work of Arts et Métiers ParisTech researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. 25One of the challenges of designing virtual humans is the definition of appropriate models of the relation between realistic emotions and the coordination of behaviors in several 27 modalities. In this paper, we present the annotation, representation and modeling of multimodal visual behaviors occurring during complex emotions. We illustrate our work 29 using a corpus of TV interviews. This corpus has been annotated at several levels of information: communicative acts, emotion labels, and multimodal signs. We have defined a 31 copy-synthesis approach to drive an Embodied Conversational Agent from these different levels of information. The second part of our paper focuses on a model of complex 33(superposition and masking of) emotions in facial expressions of the agent. We explain how the complementary aspects of our work on corpus and computational model is used 35 to specify complex emotional behaviors.

To increase the believability and life-likeness of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), we introduce a behavior synthesis technique for the generation of expressive gesturing. A small set of dimensions of expressivity is used to characterize individual variability of movement. We empirically evaluate our implementation in two separate user studies. The results suggest that our approach works well for a subset of expressive behavior. However, animation fidelity is not high enough to realize subtle changes. Interaction effects between different parameters need to be studied further.

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