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The European project CALLAS celebrates its first year
It's not the legendary Maria Callas being honoured, but an Integrated Project in research and development that's been named after her. CALLAS - Conveying Affectiveness in Leading-edge Living Adaptive Systems.
The project co-financed by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme, proposes the development of innovative technology within New Media and Digital Arts and Entertainment.
CALLAS has reached its first important results which are focused on the integration of new emotional models centred on a wider variety of sensations and emotions. These models aim to enhance the experience of the final user, whether situated in public places or the theatre to the transmission of interactive TV.
These models and components for example will enhance the experience by capturing the emotional state of the spectator and final user across a wide recognition of their facial characteristics, expressions or paralinguistic expressions.
Why does a project like CALLAS exist?
Because in today's digital society, natural communication between people, based on gestures, movements, sounds and verbal expressions is imposed with a much greater emphasis on a new form of interaction, that being between people and machines.
It is emotion, in all expressions, that has a fundamental role in the conditioning of natural communication between two people that must be emulated when service based interfaces are developed to enhance the interaction between people and machines. For this reason, the affective interfaces developed by CALLAS cover a fundamental role in the new media experiences like: Digital Theatre, Interactive TV, Augmented Reality Art and Interactive Public Performances.
Emotional multimodal interfaces aim at achieving the highest level of naturalness in human-computer interaction. One of the main challenges for CALLAS is to implement the concept of affective emotional input for interactive media rather than within a traditional interface paradigm.
One of the application schemes that its launching from the creations in Digital Theatre of Studio Azzurro Produzioni, a cutting edge lab in New Media Arts, who are one of the partners of the project. At the same time, the affective multimodal interfaces can also contribute to the future development of art forms like interactive TV or other types of digital art based on the emotional-cognitive experience of the audience.
Some of the principal partners of the 19 organisations that make up the CALLAS consortium are the media giant BBC, a number of European Universities, and a variety of small and medium enterprises, including Metaware S.p.A of Pisa, Italy. They are currently developing the software framework and they are also the director of communications for the project.
The project co-ordinator is Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, Research and Development Department.
The project co-financed by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme, proposes the development of innovative technology within New Media and Digital Arts and Entertainment. 
