Abstract

Recent years have seen the emergence of technology that involves and requires its users to be engaged through their body. This has opened the possibility to better understand and exploit this modality to capture, respond to and regulate users’ affective experience. Indeed, various studies in psychology have shown that our posture and body movement affect our emotional state, our cognitive abilities and our attitude towards the environment around us. In the first part of my talk, I will report on our studies aimed at understanding posture, body movement and touch behaviour as a means for recognizing affective states, including laughter, in whole-body games and in clinical contexts. Then, through the Digital Sensoria project, I’ll discuss how tactile experience can be measured, supported and communicated to enrich the digital affective communication channels. Finally, I will report on our studies aimed at investigating how body movement qualities can be used to steer the user experience providing a principled approach to the design of multi-modal affective technology.