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In order to be believable, embodied conversational agents (ECAs) must show expression of emotions in a consistent and natural looking way across modalities. The ECA has to be able to display coordinated signs of emotion during realistic emotional behaviour. Such a capability requires one to study and represent emotions and coordination of modalities during non-basic realistic human behaviour, to define languages for representing such behaviours to be displayed by the ECA, to have access to mono-modal representations such as gesture repositories. This chapter is concerned about coordinating the generation of signs in multiple modalities in such an affective agent. Designers of an affective agent need to know how it should coordinate its facial expression, speech, gestures and other modalities in view of showing emotion. This synchronisation of modalities is a main feature of emotions.

Despite the fact that dematerialization of all our multimedia content brings advantages, the absence of physical medium brings also a lack of tangibility. This paper presents a gesture-based interface to bring back tangibility in our dematerialized multimedia content. Our concept is to apply the drag-and-drop paradigm in the real world, using a remote control as a portal between virtual content and physical devices. In order to validate our concept, we designed a prototype focused on the transfer of digital pictures between two different devices: from a TV screen to a digital photo frame. User experiment has proven that our concept brings efficiency, easiness and a natural way to interact with digital multimedia content.

News aggregators are widely used to read RSS feeds but they require the user to be in front of a screen. While moving, people usually do not have any display, or very small ones. Moreover, they need to perform actions to get access to the news: download a tool, choose to generate audio files from the news, and send them to e.g. an MP3 player. We propose in this paper a system that automatically detects when the user leaves the computer room and directly sends the trans-coded news onto the user Smartphone. All the aggregated news are then transmitted to the user who can listen to them without any action. We present in this paper such a system and the very promising results we obtained after testing it.

In this paper we present a telerehabilitation system aiming to help physiotherapists on the shoulder and elbow treatment. Our system is based on a two-arm haptic force feedback to avoid excessive efforts and discomfort with the spinal column and is remotely controlled by smart phone. The validation of our system, with the help of muscular effort measurements (EMG) and supervised by a physiotherapist, provides very promising results.

Despite the wide amount of computer graphics frameworks and solutions available, it is still difficult to find a perfect one fitting at the same time many constraints, like pedagogical intents and user-friendliness or speed with high rendering quality and portability. In this article we describe our contribution to the topic: the Mental Vision platform. Mental Vision is a framework composed of a teaching/research oriented graphics engine simplifying the users needs in computer visualization and a set of corollary tools specifically designed for practicing and learning of computer graphics and virtual reality. In this dissertation we explain our approach design and the contribution brought into a series of study cases to show how concretely Mental Vision satisfies existing needs not addressed by other solutions.

Virtual Environments (VE) are mainly visual experiments that exclude visually impaired people. In this paper we present an application that should allow almost everybody to ``see'' or at least to perceive 3D shapes. We will first describe the mandatory aspects of such an application, the tests we made and finally conclude by the results we obtained with geometrically basic shapes that are very promising.

The use of inhabited Virtual Environments is continuously growing. People can embody a human-like avatar to participate inside these Virtual Environments or they can have personalized character acting as mediator; sometimes they can even customize it to some extent. Those Virtual Characters belong to the software owner, but they could be potentially shared, exchanged and individualized between participants, such as already proposed by Sony with Station Exchange. Technology with standards could significantly improve the exchange, the reuse and the creation of such Virtual Characters. However an optimal reuse is only possible if the main components of the characters: geometry, morphology, animation and behavior, are annotated with semantics. This may allow to users searching for specific models and customize them. Moreover search technology based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) can be implemented to provide this type of service. In this paper we present the considerations to build an ontology that fulfills the mentioned proposes.