AMARA: An affective agent to enhance users' enjoyment and engagement with online art collections

Abstract

This demonstration presents AMARA, a novel interactive system to help novice art enthusiasts browse online art collections. Currently being developed for the Indianapolis Museum of Art website, the system uses an embedded interactive agent who asks users a series of simple and straightforward multiple-choice questions regarding users' current feelings, preferences, and interests in art. The answers to each question are mapped to social tags, which are then used to retrieve and display relevant artworks the user may find interesting or appealing. Using AMARA, users can easily browse or search through online art collections without having to use a traditional keyword search, which requires extensive knowledge of art terminology or advanced subject expertise. Thus, AMARA was designed to enhance users' enjoyment and engagement with online art collections and assist users in discovering their known and unknown preferences in art.