...as Maria CALLAS provided a more emotional approach to her music, the CALLAS project will introduce emotional and natural interaction into New Media applications ...
There is currently a gap between the emerging capacity of conveying emotional aspects within multi-modal interaction and the growing expectations of people for a more natural and pervasive interaction with digital media applications in intelligent adaptive spaces.
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. Field studies are also performed in the project to evaluate and document the emotional experience of audiences experimenting CALLAS artworks.
The blend of competencies represented by the partners of the CALLAS Consortium is a warranty to succeed, but wide participation by external members is sponsored, to complement our understanding of the requirements of artists, amateurs, technologists, performers and potential early adopters of the technology.
Vital to the project is the C³ : the CALLAS Community Club social network, where discussion threads are open, opinions shared, synergy with project developments and technology evaluation is kept to maximise the adoption. Specific events are organised to debate research topics and its applications, to which Club members will be invited: the first CALLAS event took place in Palermo 4/May/07: CALLAS Workshop on Digital Technologies and Theatre in conjunction with the 110th anniversary of the Fondazione Teatro Massimo. Latest event has just been held at Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome on 9-10/Sept/09 during CIMCIM2009.
Image credits: Giacomo mio, salviamoci! Teatro Lauro Rossi, Macerata, 1998 © Studio Azzurro Produzioni s.r
