Emo Land
Team Work, Advised by Dr. Min Fan
Web-based Application
Emo Land is a web-based application combined with animation, games, artificial intelligence, and emotional computing. Its main goal is to support autistic children aged 5-8 in social norms and facial expressions cognitive learning.
Research:
Emotional Cognitive Learning of Autistic Children
![]()
Studies have shown that the deficiency of emotional recognition in autistic children, especially the delay and deviation of facial emotion recognition, is the main cause of their communication difficulties. The education and rehabilitation of autistic children is a long-term intervention process.
Traditional methods of using intervention physicians are often scarce and expensive. We hope to use digital and gamified tools to achieve the purpose of "reducing intervention costs and improving intervention efficiency", to benefit special children through design and realize educational equity.
Design Scheme
Our goal is to design digital intervention tools that combined the effects of animation, games, and artificial intelligence. We focus on “Expressing and Applying”, rather than the simple “Recognizing and Matching” in most computer-aided intervention methods and tools. Our team aims to design a clear process in the system, considering that autistic children‘s cognition is lower. We need to reduce the users’ study costs both for children and adults.
Original Version
The animation part is about the fictional story of Luke and his friends, and Luke is also the guide of the whole system. The story takes place in three social settings familiar to children with autism: school, home, and park. Each scene has animation films corresponding to six basic expressions: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust and fear.
Home page
Choose the level
Choose the story
Step1.Watch the animation
Step2. Choose the right expression
Step3. Facial emotion recognition
Step4. Practice facial expression
Step5. In-person game with parents/ tutors
Usability Testing and Problems
To protect children, no photos are allowed at all times during the test at the special education school.The const in the original version, the offline game’s part is not enough ingenious. The links between emotion and games are too weak, such as the “surprised”, so they can not evoke children’s emotions and reactions effectively.
In the iteration, I added magic games and physical games and standardized the game instructions which are easy for parents or teachers to understand and operate. ant iteration of offline games
Part of the iteration process in the form
Version 2
In version 2, we made the following improvements:
1. Redesigned the holistic UI; changed the color system.
2. Added a new part: a jigsaw puzzle of facial expression.
3. Optimized texts, audio, and offline games.
