The Callas Project

CALLAS (the acronym stands for Conveying Affectiveness in Leading-edge Living Adaptive Systems) is a integrated project funded by the European Commission.

In the project vision, ambitious challenges are pursued: partners from different countries are working together in pursuit a common goal that will contribute to reduce the cost and the complexity of development of multimodal interfaces in the Digital Entertainment and Information context.

• to produce a set of components (known as Shelf components) which can be used to generate emotionally-aware user interfaces (or Affective Multimodal Interfaces).
• to handle interoperability between the components through the open source CALLAS Framework
• to provide APIs to 3rd party developers through which the shelf components and emotional model might be accessed.

Finally, the capabilities of the CALLAS Framework will be demonstrated through the development of CALLAS Showcases, significant test-beds in the context of New Media, embryonic samples of applications of the future.

CALLAS aims to design and develop a Framework based on a plug-in multimodal architecture, invariant to configuration of Multimodal Components, to interpret and process emotional aspects in real-time for easy and fast development of applications for Art and Entertainment, paying attention to the value of users, who are no longer passive spectators of artistic performances, but stimulating sources of human communication. The project is developing selected scenarios for Art and Entertainment, to showcase CALLAS technology in different typologies of space: theatres, home, squares, festivals, etc., as the "space" is one of the most interesting factors where human emotional interaction takes place. A strong attention is given to all interface and interaction aspects, to minimize the complexity for multimodal handling, to make creative industries and artists free to develop truly interactive art, keeping the technology burden hidden and preserving the naturalness of user interaction, not altering the spontaneity of their experience.

http://www.callas-newmedia.eu/