“Chilly Chair: Facilitating an Emotional Feeling with Artificial Piloerection” by Fukushima and Kajimoto

  • ©Shogo Fukushima and Hiroyuki Kajimoto

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Entry Number: 05

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    Chilly Chair: Facilitating an Emotional Feeling with Artificial Piloerection

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    In audio-visual entertainment such as listening to music, game playing, and viewing movies, people frequently seek a richer experience. However the improvement in experience that can be obtained by improving audio and visual quality is reaching its limit.

    Adding haptic stimulation to entertainment is a promising step to enrich these experiences and has been attempted in a number of studies such as in a vibration headphone [Koss Corporation], vibration-embedded chair [Israr et al. 2010], and jacket-shaped tactile display [Lemmens et al. 2009]. These tactile interfaces improve the reality of entertainment by transferring various cues from the contents onto the body. In contrast, we present a novel approach that directly facilitates the emotional feeling evoked by the content, using haptic technologies. We speculated that the quantity of emotional feeling evoked by the content is one of the most critical factors in determining the quality of the entertainment.

    To enhance the emotional feeling with haptic technologies, we focus on piloerection, which is a type of involuntary emotional reaction. According to James Lange theory, emotional feeling is experienced as a result of physiological change in the body induced by the autonomic nervous system. Damasio et al. also predicted that emotional feeling is evoked by the insula cortex that represents particular bodily reactions such as the sensations of butterflies in the stomach and goose bumps [Damasio et al. 2000]. Our hypothesis is that not only is piloerection an emotional “reaction”, but it can also work as an emotional “input” that enhances the emotional feeling itself.

References:


    LEMMENS, P. et al., A body-conforming tactile jacket to enrich movie viewing. In Proc. World Haptics ‘09, pages 7-12. 2009.

    ISRAR, A. et al., Exploring surround haptics displays. In Proceedings of CHI ’10 (Ex-tended Abstracts), ACM, pp.4171-4176, 2010.

    ANTONIO R. DAMASIO. et al., Subcortical and cortical brain activity during the feeling of self-generated emotions. Nature Neuroscience, 3, pp1049-1056, 2000.

    FUKUSHIMA, S. et al., Facilitating a Surprise Feeling by Artificial Control of Piloerection on the Forearm, To appear in 3rd Augmented Human international conference, 2012.


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©Shogo Fukushima and Hiroyuki Kajimoto ©Shogo Fukushima and Hiroyuki Kajimoto ©Shogo Fukushima and Hiroyuki Kajimoto

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