Colourful emotions

We’re currently putting the new plant spirit characters in Germination X and thinking more about how to use colour changes as part of the expression of the many emotions the FAtiMA agents contain.

I made this chart quickly, deliberately avoiding thinking about potential reasons for my choices. Interestingly I found I needed to start with the motion curves first (which describe how the colours are blended between over time) and these seemed much less arbitrary than the actual colours I chose. The reason could be that there is a closer connection between movement (however simple) and gestural expressions.


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4 responses to “Colourful emotions”

  1. pixelpusher Avatar
    pixelpusher

    Great, Dave… these are really fascinating. It’s something we’ve been looking at too, for our Life Project – “simple” sounds and lights that show the emotional state of a digital “creature.” Except in our case, they’re physical objects. We’ve been looking at your blog, your last post about research into the perception of color/sound/etc. corresponding to emotions was really useful. The idea of diagramming the color changes in 2D is brilliant, we may have to “borrow” bits of this idea (is it GPL’d or CC’d? 😉

    On another note, it looks like these are waveforms – are they supposed to repeat indefinitely? When we did some brainstorming, people came up with some one-shot synth ideas, like a wolf’s whistle for “horniness.” Speaking of which, where is horniness?! Or is it simply a Platonic love that the spirits feel?

  2. dave Avatar

    Hi Mr Pixelpusher – the emotions come from the Ortony-Clore-Collins cognitive model which the FAtiMA software is based on.

    Online material seems scarce, but this is quite useful:

    http://www.icosilune.com/2008/12/ortony-clore-and-collins-the-cognitive-structure-of-emotions/

    And yup, all my work is GPL/CC so please use it.

  3. […] were made with the colours of the plants and the general feel of the game in mind. I think the problems I found with this exercise was a lack of context – perhaps thinking too abstractly about this is a bad […]

  4. Michaela Avatar
    Michaela

    Yeah synaesthesia!

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