Towards Humor Modelling and Facilitation in Smart Environments

We know about word play, verbal jokes, and about humor that appears spontaneously in conversations. This humor is studied in computational linguistics, together with issues such as verbal incongruities, ambiguities, irony and sarcasm. These appearances of humor are also part of computational humor studies, where a broader view is taken, that is, a view that includes artificial intelligence, reasoning, common-sense and context representations, and machine learning. But there are other kinds of humor. We can laugh about events that appear in our physical world. We can play an active role in having these events happening. Obviously, they can be accompanied with verbal comments and interaction. Nowadays physical worlds are equipped with multimodal sensors and multimedia actuators. Environments do not only have human inhabitants, but also tangibles, wearables, social robots and 2D and 3D display possibilities that can help to create changes in the world that is perceived by its human inhabitants. The possibility of humor creation can be transferred from the purely linguistics worlds of text and verbal exchanges to virtual, mixed, augmented and physical reality intelligent environments equipped with sensors and actuators that can help to create and control humorous events. In this paper we introduce this research area and we survey what is available in humor research literature that may help to establish this research area. Applications of this research include avatar behavior in videogames, robot and product behavior in entertainment, social, and game environments, and in smart physical environments that allow for playful and humorous events.