Recognition of emotional brain activities in virtual reality environment: A position paper

Emotion recognition is one of the key steps towards emotional intelligence in Human Computer interaction (HCI). Using a brain-computer interface (BCI) to detect and identify emotions could improve the quality and effectiveness of HCI. Researchers have shown that it is possible to extract emotional cues from electroencephalography (EEG) measurements that become a way to investigate the emotional activity of a subject beyond his conscious and controllable behaviours. In this view, we aim at designing, building and testing a flexible system for the recognition of emotions of users on the base of their brain activity. This main goal involves several topics of investigation: (1) How to design such a system? Which architecture and techniques are more suitable? Which is the most proper kind of interaction? (2) Which is the best way (instrument, set-up) to acquire EEG data with relevant information for evaluating the emotional state of the user? (3) What processing techniques and classification methodologies are best suited to recognize emotion from EEG data? (4) How self-induced emotions could be used in a BCI paradigm (real-time data processing)?.