Play with Emotional Characters: Improving User Emotional Experience by A Data-driven Approach in VR Volleyball Games

In real-world volleyball games, players are generally aware of the emotions of other players as they can observe facial expressions, body behaviors, etc., which evokes a rich emotional experience. However, most of the VR volleyball games mainly concentrate on modeling the game playing, rather than supporting an emotional experience. We introduce a data-driven framework to enhance the user's emotional experience and engagement by building emotional virtual characters in VR volleyball games. This framework enables virtual characters to arouse emotions according to the game state and express emotions through facial expressions. Evaluation results demonstrate our framework has benefits to enhance user's emotional experience and engagement.