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Touch & Talk: Contextualizing Remote Touch for Affective Interaction

Rongrong Wang (Center for Human Computer Interaction)
Francis Quek (Center for Human Computer Interaction)

Abstract

Touch is an immediate and expressive channel in interpersonal communication to express intimacy and convey emotions. We present a review of relevant the psychological and sociological literature of touch and propose a model of immediacy and uniqueness of the touch channel for conveyance of affect. We review previous work in mediated social touch and show how existing approaches often rob touch of its privileged position in conveyance of affect, and use it as a low-bit-rate symbolic information system. We posit that the strategic provision of contextualizing channels will liberate touch to resume its role in affect conveyance. Armed with this analysis, we propose two design guide-lines: first, touch channel needs to be coupled with other communication channels to clarify its meaning; second, use touch as an immediate channel by not assigning any symbolic meaning to touch interactions. We proceed to describe our haptic interface design based on these guidelines. Our in-lab between-subjects experiment shows that remote touch reduces subjectsí sadness emotion significantly and also shows a trend to reduce general negative mood and to reinforce joviality.

Document

http://tei-conf.org/10/uploads/Program/p13.pdf

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