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Dr Marc Fabri
Senior Visiting Research Fellow

Innovation North
Faculty of Information and Technology
Leeds Metropolitan University
Caedmon Hall, Headingley Campus
Leeds LS6 3QS
United Kingdom

m.fabri@leedsmet.ac.uk

Tel: +44 (0)113 812 3242
Fax: +44 (0)113 812 6166




General Research Interests

  • Emotionally Expressive Avatars
  • Likeability of Virtual Characters
  • Emotion, Empathy and Trust in HCI
  • Virtual Characters in Healthcare and Therapy
  • Web Usability and Web Accessibility
  • User-Centred Interface Design

Member of Interaction, a specialist HCI group of the British Computer Society. Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Member of Leeds Met Centre for Creative Technology (Prof Reinhold Behringer), and Interaction and Learning Technology Group (Prof Janet Finlay).


The Virtual Messenger Interface (see publications for details)

 


Collaboration

Please collaborate! I am actively looking to work with other researchers or groups, in particular in the following areas:

  • How Virtual Characters can engender Trust and Likeability
    As humans we have a life-time of experience interacting with others, using both innate and learned social behaviour. This can be leveraged when humans interact with avatars, either human-controlled or agent-controlled. An interesting aspect that came out of recent research work is the use of empathy and how it affects trust and likeability between people meeting 'virtually'. Some questions arise... What effect does one's appearance have? Can empathy be used as a deliberate communication device? Are people aware of what is happening, and does it matter? Answering these questions can be highly significant for social networking systems and other online communities of the future - any situation where a trust relationship may be formed over a distance. At the same time, there are important ethical issues since a carefully designed virtual character can potentially manipulate the human observer very effectively.

  • Making Digitised Art Collections accessible to the Visually Impaired
    Large museums such as the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery have traditionally put some effort into making important exhibits accessible to the visually impaired, including the totally blind. This ranges from objective audio descriptions over access with enhancing or magnifying devices to tactile tours where visitors are allowed to touch and interact with exhibits directly. However, little work has gone into making similar efforts with digital collections, as presented on the Internet. More and more galleries and museums are keen to create digital images of their artefacts in order to them online, with the aim to widen their audiences beyond the confines of a physical gallery space. To comply with the Disability Discrimination Act, these online collections ought to be accessible to the widest range of users, but they generally exclude the visually impaired.

  • Applications for the Virtual Messenger Tool
    The Virtual Messenger allows two people to communicate via text-chat and by exchanging facial expressions. Think of it as a standard Messenger tool where the other person's image is replaced by their animated avatar. If you are interested in using or further developing the Virtual Messenger tool, please contact me. The application has been developed in Visual Basic and uses an ActiveX control (bioVirtual XPlayer) to animate the head. It is currently not suitable for web delivery or for installation on a Mac, and I am keen to explore development of a Flash-based version.

 


PhD Research students

  • Salima Y Awad Elzouki: Computer-based animated expressive characters for people with autism
  • Mohammed Habash: Non-verbal aspects of Collaborative Virtual Environments for people with autism
  • Johannes Skala: A one-hand Braille keyboard for the blind and visually impaired

 



Conference and workshop organisation

  • Workshop "Emotion in HCI - Designing for People " at HCI 2008 conference in Liverpool, UK (with Christian Peter, Beth Crane, Lesley Axelrod and Harry Agius) - see workshop site at www.emotion-in-hci.net
  • With Asimina Vasalou I co-organised a special session on "Emotions in HCI" at the 2007 HCI International conference, held in Beijing, China. The session focused on animated characters, the emotional experience of users, and evaluation methods for affective interfaces.
  • Poster chair for HCI 2007, the annual international conference of the BCS-HCI group.
  • Member of organising committee for HCI 2006 in London, HCI 2005 in Edinburgh, HCI 2004 in Leeds.
  • Member of Programme Committee for IHCI 2008 in Amsterdam, IHCI 2007 in Lisbon.

 


Selected publications

Fabri, M., Moore, D.J., Hobbs, D.J. (2008 - in press) Designing Avatars for Social Interactions, in L. Canamero and R. Aylett (eds.) Animating Expressive Characters for Social Interaction, Advances in Consciousness Research Series, Benjamins Publishing

Fabri, M., Peter, C., Girard, S., Agius, H. (2008) An effective application for tackling patient depression, in Christian Peter, Russell Beale, Elizabeth Crane, Lesley Axelrod, Gerred Blyth (Eds.): Emotion in HCI: Joint Proceedings of the 2005, 2006, and 2007 Intl. Workshops. Fraunhofer IRB Verlag, Stuttgart, ISBN 978-3-8167-7540-9
[Paper]

Fabri, M. (2008) The Virtual Messenger - Online Chat using Emotionally Expressive Avatars, in Christian Peter, Russell Beale, Elizabeth Crane, Lesley Axelrod, Gerred Blyth (Eds.): Emotion in HCI: Joint Proceedings of the 2005, 2006, and 2007 Intl. Workshops. Fraunhofer IRB Verlag, Stuttgart, ISBN 978-3-8167-7540-9

Elzouki, S., Fabri, M., Moore, D. (2007) Teaching severely autistic children to recognise emotions: Finding a methodology, in D. Ramduny-Ellis, D. Rachovides (eds.) Proceedings of HCI 2007, BCS-HCI Group Conference (Vol 2), Lancaster, 3-7 September 2007, BCS Press

Fabri, M., Elzouki, S., Moore, D. (2007) Emotionally expressive avatars for chatting, learning and therapeutic intervention, in J. Jacko (ed.) Human-Computer Interaction, Part III, HCII 2007, LNCS 4552, pp. 275–285, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
[Paper]

Fabri, M. (2006) Emotionally Expressive Avatars for Collaborative Virtual Environments, PhD Thesis, Leeds Metropolitan University, November 2006
{Thesis]

Fabri, M., Moore, D.J. (2005) Is Empathy the Key? Effective Communication via Instant Messaging, in Proceedings of 11th EATA International Conference on Networking Entities, October 2005, St. Pölten, Austria
{Paper]

Fabri, M., Moore, D.J., Hobbs, D.J. (2005) Empathy and Enjoyment in Instant Messaging, in Lachlan McKinnon, Olav Bertelsen, Nick Bryan-Kinns (eds.) Proceedings of HCI2005: The Bigger Picture (Volume 2) , September 2005, Edinburgh, UK
[Paper]

Fabri, M., Moore, D.J. (2005) The use of emotionally expressive avatars in Collaborative Virtual Environments, in Proceedings of the AISB Symposium on Virtual Social Agents, April 2005, University of Hertfordshire, UK
[Paper]

Fabri, M., Moore, D.J., Hobbs, D.J. (2004) Putting on a brave face with Instant Messaging, in Andy Dearden and Leon Watts (eds.) Proceedings of HCI 2004: Design for Life (Volume 2), September 2004, Leeds, UK, pp. 29-33
[Paper]

Allgar, E., Finlay, J., Fabri, M., Entwistle, T. (2004) Investigating the user's experience of the Living Image installation, in Proceedings of HCI 2004: Design for Life, September 2004, Leeds, UK

Fabri, M., Moore, D.J., Hobbs, D.J (2004) Mediating the Expression of Emotion in Educational Collaborative Virtual Environments: An Experimental Study, in International Journal of Virtual Reality, 7(2), Springer Verlag London, pp 66-81
[Journal Link] [Paper]

Fabri, M., Moore, D. (2004) Designing Emotionally Expressive Avatars for Virtual Meetings, presented at Workshop on Designing and Evaluating Virtual Reality Systems, Nottingham University, January 2004

Gerhard, M., Fabri, M. (2003) Collaborative Virtual Environments, in K. Fernie and J.D. Richards (eds.) Creating and Using Virtual Reality: A Guide for the Arts and Humanities, Oxbow Books, Oxford, ISBN 1842170406

Fabri, M., Hobbs, D.J., Moore, D.J. (2002) Emotive Signals for Virtual Worlds, in H. Sharp, J. LePeuple, P. Chark, J. Rosbottom (eds.) HCI 2002 Volume 2, BCS Press, London, ISBN 1-902505-48-4

Fabri, M., Moore, D.J., Hobbs, D.J. (2002) Expressive Agents: Non-verbal Communication in Collaborative Virtual Environments, in Proceedings of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (Embodied Conversational Agents), July 2002, Bologna, Italy

Fabri, M., Moore, D.J., Hobbs, D.J. (2002) Face Value: Towards Emotionally Expressive Avatars, in Proceeding of AISB Convention on Animated Expressive Characters for Social Interaction, London, UK, ISBN 1-902-95625-6

Fabri, M., Gerhard, M. (2000) The Virtual Student: User Embodiment in Virtual Learning Environments, in Graham Orange and Dave Hobbs (eds.) International Perspectives on Tele-Education and Virtual Learning Environments, Ashgate, Aldershot, UK, ISBN 0754612023, pp. 32-55
[Book]

Fabri, M., Moore, D.J., Hobbs, D.J. (1999) The Emotional Avatar: Nonverbal Communication between Inhabitants of Collaborative Virtual Environments, in Braffort et al (eds.) Gesture-Based Communication in Human-Computer Interaction, Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 1739, ISBN 3-540-66935-3, pp 245-248
[Book]

Fabri, M., Gerhard, M., Moore, D.J., Hobbs, D.J. (1999) Perceiving the Others: Cognitive Processes in Collaborative Virtual Environments, in Proceedings of 17th Annual Conference of the Eurographics-UK Chapter, April 1999, Cambridge, UK

Gerhard, M., Fabri, M., Moore, D.J., Hobbs, D.J. (1999) Agents for Networked Virtual Learning Environments, in Günther, J., Zeibekakis G., (eds.) Networking Entities: Tele-education, telematics & law, telematics & culture, Donauuniversität Krems, Austria, ISBN 3-901876-05-7

Gerhard, M., Fabri, M., Moore, D.J., Hobbs, D.J. (1999) Cognitive Immersion in CVEs: A Hybrid Avatar/Agent Model for User Representation in Virtual Learning Environments, in Proceedings of 17th Annual Conference of the Eurographics-UK Chapter, April 1999, Cambridge, UK

Fabri, M., Hobbs, D.J. (1998) What you see is what I mean: Virtual Encounters in Distance Learning Systems, in Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Network Entities (Neties'98), October 1998, Leeds, UK


Links

Axis - the leading online guide to artists practising in the UK
I also work with Axis, a Leeds-based national arts charity. Axis enables commissioners, gallerists, architects and other arts professionals to find artists for work opportunities. Axis actively researches opportunities for artists and organises events, conferences, exhibitions, presentations and workshops to promote its artists and encourage the creation of new contemporary art.
URL: www.axisweb.org

Creating and Using Virtual Reality: A Guide for the Arts and Humanities
Intended for those who are interested in how virtual reality can be used within the arts and humanities. The guide focusses on accessible desk-top virtual reality which may be distributed and viewed on-line via the World Wide Web. It is concerned with the variety of virtual reality models that may be produced and how to ensure that these can be delivered successfully to users and preserved for future re-use.
URL: vads.ahds.ac.uk/guides/vr_guide/

Curriculum Vitae
How did I get here?