“EMO”: Design of an Emotional Communication Device based on Gestural Interactions

Abstract

Our objective is to imagine and design concepts of tangible communication devices that allow to remotely share emotions. Tangible devices are operated by users' gestures and touch, thus, for usability purpose, it is necessary to investigate what gestures are intuitively performed by users for expressing given patterns of emotions. We conducted an experiment where participants had to perform a gestural and/or tactile interaction with device to express emotions with various levels of arousal and valence. Videos of the gestural interactions were recorded and participants completed questionnaires. The data analysis shows a large variety of gestures across the sample of participants, while there is a low inter-individual variety in the intensity and the location of the gesture used for expressing a given emotion. The results of the study were used as a source of inspiration for designing “EMO”, a gesture-based emotional communication device. The interactive functional prototype and the appearance prototype are described in the paper.