This is the kind of thing I get up to when I'm bored. This application controls a smiley face, and has sliders to control 4 seperate emotional components: happiness/sadness, suprise, anger and confusion. As they are independent, you can combine theme into "combo" emotions such as "happy and suprised", "angry and confused", etc.

Its remarkably expressive, and kinda cute - although maxing out "angry and happy" is just plain evil. I'd be interested to know what people think of my selection of four main "emotional components" from a visual perspective - should I have seperated happy & sad into two, or included others rather than these?

As the icing on the cake, it uses speech synthesis to say whatever you want it to - for this reason, it requires the .NET 3.5 runtime to be installed. Based on the speech synthesis's viseme event output, I had a good go at lip-synching the speech - but when you only have lips to work with, and no tongue or teeth - and its in 2d - the results are a bit limited.

I have vague ideas of using it as an interactive interface for ... something, but I've yet to come up with any good candidates yet. Any suggestions are most welcome!

Emotion requires .NET 3.5 to run, and is available here:
http://www.ftwinston.com/download?file=Emotion.zip
Note that the controls window is accessed by clicking on the smiley face.