Joshua Penick
Cindy Skach
Reference Information
Dzmitry Tsetserukou, Mitsuru Ishizuka, Alena Neviarouskaya, Susumu Tachi, Helmut Prendinger, CHI 2010 Atlanta, GA April 2010
Summary
This paper goes through the novel idea of allowing physical feedback when instant messaging between clients in order to "feel" what the user's are emoting. They created many different modules in order to experience certain types of emotions. Some include hugging, joy, fear, love, etc. The modules were "hands" that were placed on the user's back and will apply pressure to feel like a hug. A "heart" to send heart beat sounds to the user's chest. Also a "butterfly" to simulate "butterflies in the stomach".
Discussion
While I find that in the world of IM there is a significant gap of emotion when speaking to others, this article was a little silly. It is a good idea because a lot of times things get lost in translation and one user's sarcasm may be interpreted as hostility by the other person. I actually think working on tone inflection in user's messages somehow would be a lot more beneficial. This is because no one can tell when sarcasm is being but into messages or when emphasis needs to be brought to a certain statement.
I would also say that this group is not the first to attempt this type of product. Producing some sort of feedback for computer users when talking to each other has been a topic since the 1990s. Also, I believe this would not have a lot of adoption because of the high cost of producing the modules.
Yeah, I've got to agree that this sounds pretty silly. I'm not really sure how beneficial this would be. Feeling little hands patting your back doesn't really sound any better than seeing an emoticon to symbolize hugging. They both get the point across but the former seems kind of weird... But I also agree that more work in this field needs to be done. There's been several times in the past (distant past, like high school past) when people I know have gotten into an argument because of a misunderstanding through instant messenger.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious to know what their idea of feeling fear is. I don't find that particularly appealing. There also arises the issues of unwanted sollicitations.
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