Enhancing Emotional Experience by Building Emotional Virtual Characters in VR Volleyball Games

Virtual reality (VR) volleyball games can provide an immersive entertainment experience and facilitate users to get familiar with game rules. In real world, players often experience emotions from scores, strokes, passes, and the influence from their teammates or opponents, and so forth. However, seldom studies are carried out for this emotional experience in a virtual environment, as most VR volleyball games mainly concentrate on the game playing, such as body movements. In this article, we propose to enhance emotional experience by building emotional virtual characters in VR volleyball games. The virtual characters cannot only arouse their emotions but also express their facial expressions according to the game situation. Emotion patterns are learned from real-world volleyball matches. The results demonstrate that our framework has great potential to enhance the user's emotional experience and engagement.