Tango Project

Many everyday actions take place in a social context and affective information forms an important channel of social communication. The goal of the TANGO project is to take these two familiar ideas one radical step further by focussing on the essential interactive nature of social communication, in the domain of non verbal communication based entirely on facial and bodily expression. We will investigate interactions in real life contexts showing agents in daily life situations such as communication or navigation.

A central goal of the project is the development of an exact mathematical theory of emotional communicative behaviour. Based on such a theory combined with advanced methods from computer vision and computer graphics emotional interactions can be studied quantitatively in detail and can be transferred in technical systems that simulate believable emotional interactive behaviour. Current common motion synthesis techniques in computer graphics mainly focus on physical factors. The role of other factors, and specifically psychological variables, is neglected and not well understood. Based on the obtained experimental results and mathematical new generation of technical devices establishing emotional communication between humans and machines will be developed. TANGO goes beyond the sate of the art in theoretical scope, in methodological approaches and in innovative applications that are anticipated.