Effective affective communication in virtual environments

Studies of communication between entities in virtual environments have tended to focus on the relevant technical issues and its social impact impact. An important component of human communication is the conveying of affective information via voice, facial expression and gestures and other body language. Virtual environments may be populated by representations of human or virtual agent participants. Communications may be between person-person, agent-agent or person-agent. This paper explores the possible use of the affective communication in virtual environments. The desirability of affective communication is examined and some research ideas for developing affective communication in virtual environments are proposed.