An Entertainment System Using Thermal Feedback for Increasing Communication and Social Skills

Authors:
Takuji Narumi;Tomohiro Akagawa;Young Ah Seong;Michitaka Hirose
Affiliations:
The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science,;Tokyo University of the Arts, Yokohama, Japan;The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Venue:
Edutainment '09 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on E-Learning and Games: Learning by Playing. Game-based Education System Design and Development
Year:
2009

Citing 3
Cited 4

Informative art: using amplified artworks as information displays

DARE '00 Proceedings of DARE 2000 on Designing augmented reality environments
Ambient Displays: Turning Architectural Space into an Interface between People and Digital Information

CoBuild '98 Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cooperative Buildings, Integrating Information, Organization, and Architecture
Guest Editors' Introduction: Urban Computing--Navigating Space and Context

Computer

Enhancing interactional synchrony with an ambient display

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Explorative research on the heat as an expression medium: focused on interpersonal communication

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing
Manipulation of an emotional experience by real-time deformed facial feedback

Proceedings of the 4th Augmented Human International Conference
Comix: beyond: evoking multiple emotions using pseudo body responses depending on the context

SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 Emerging Technologies

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Although social skills are important, to increase these skills is difficult. In this paper we propose an experimental system that lets a user "feel" the appropriate distance between him/her and another person in order for social interaction to take place in an optimal setting. We created wearable thermal devices that transmit thermal information to the person wearing them and linked them to an edutainment system called "Thermo-society". "Thermo-society" is a system that creates thermal sensory spots around people in an open space. Thermal sensory spots are generated based on the knowledge of proxemics. Through an experiment, we analyze people's behavior in the space. As a result of the analysis, we estimate the average distance between two users in the same group is 1.45meters. We noticed in our experiment that people, when playing Thermo-society, allow strangers to come in personal distance in 44.4% of the cases, which suggests that our system increases the potential for social interactions.