Welcome to Universal Character Experiment 2008 Ver.2 

 Click the logo to start the experiment.

News

• Universal Character Experiment 2008 Ver. 2 started on 31 January, 2008.
• If you are a first timer, please read the following instruction.
• If you participated in the experiment before, welcome back! Try the new version.

Purpose of the experiment

The purpose of this experiment is to study whether character representations and facial expressions are interpreted equally across different cultures.

Organization

This research is jointly conducted by the Human Interface Lab, Faculty of Information Science and Technology at Osaka Institute of Technology, and Multimedia Concepts and Applications, Faculty of Applied Computer Science at University of Augsburg.

Procedure of the experiment

The web experiment is presented as a matching puzzle game. You are requested to match 12 facial expressions to 12 adjectives.
There will be 7 different characters (with 12 facial expressions).

Please continue the experiment until you finish evaluating all the 7 characters and you see a "Thank you." message. It takes about 10-15 minutes to complete the whole sets of experiment.

Your answers to the puzzle game are sent to and stored on a server file for each set. They are stored in a secured disk, and will be used only in the conduct of this research project or related projects.

How to play the matching puzzle game

1. You will see 12 facial expressions displayed in a 4x3 matrix and 12 adjectives on yellow labels.
2. Match each facial expression to an appropriate adjective by dragging/dropping a yellow label.
3. You can keep changing the location of labels until you are confident of your answers.
4. Check your confidence level of each expression-adjetive pair by seleting a radio button located in the right side of each image.

Attention

• You need Adobe Flash Player to participate in the experiment. Click here to get the latest Adobe Flash Player.
  
• You may see a messge from a pop-up blocker. Please accept to download ActiveX coctrol. This web experiment site is safe.
• Please don't click the reload button on your browser during the experiment (when the flash content is displayed), otherwise, you will need to start the experiment from the beginning.
• If your display's resolution is not high enough (600x800 or higher recommended), you may not be able to see the whole puzzle game.

Are you ready? Click the logo to start the experiment.

Send your questions and comments to Tomoko Koda "koda_at_is.oit.ac.jp" (replace _at_ with @)

This research is funded by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science(JSPS).

Copyright 2007  Prof. Dr. Tomoko Koda at Human Interface Lab, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Osaka Institute of Technology, and Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Andre and Dr. Matthias Rehm at Multimedia Concepts and Applications, Faculty of Applied Computer Science at University of Augsburg.