ABSTRACT: This article highlights the overlapping and converging goals and challenges of autism research and affective computing. We propose that a collaboration between autism research and affective computing could lead to several mutually beneficial outcomes—from developing new tools to assist people with autism in understanding and operating in the socioemotional world around them, to developing new computational models and theories that will enable technology to be modified to provide an overall better socioemotional experience to all people who use it. This article describes work toward this convergence at the MIT Media Lab, and anticipates new research that might arise from the interaction between research into autism, technology, and human socioemotional intelligence.

In this paper we describe our design and prototype of a full-body, collocated, cooperative digital painting game for two players we call “WePaint”. Our goal for the WePaint system is to offer an engaging, low-pressure environment in which children with developmental disorders, such as those on the autism spectrum, can reinforce the social skill of cooperation. We describe an observational study that informed the design of WePaint, and discuss how we employed two game mechanisms (resource limitation and requirement for concurrent action) to encourage cooperation in WePaint.