Affective Interaction
An affective human-computer interaction [1] is considered one in which emotional and similar information is communicated by the user to the computer in a comfortable and not disruptive way. The computer translates the information and tries to improve the interaction with the user. For a long time [2], emotions were considered undesirable for rational behaviour, but there is now evidence that they are essential in problem-solving capabilities and intelligence. This resulted in a new emerging field, Affective Interaction.
Communicating emotional information is often not considered important in interaction design. There are systems that attempt to please the user but don’t check if their actions made the user angry or happy. The system should be able to receive some feedback from the user to constantly adapt and reinforce or remove negatively-perceived actions [1]. A number of learning systems, mainly robots were designed with the ability to passively sense emotions. A well-known example is “Kismet”, a robot that learns from a person’s affective positive or negative information that can be extracted from the person’s speech.
No matter how usable or well-designed an interface is, it will not please all types of users [1]. Modern software can be tweaked by the user to adapt to their needs or likings, but software that self-adapts is hard to design. A design that changes constantly or one that does not change when it should, will be annoying. It’s hard to design software that knows when to change and also know if the changes made affected the user positively or not. To attain the right balance in the interaction in order to please the user, human-human interactions can be used to inform human-computer interactions. Some “smart” systems [1] attempt to please the user by automating the tasks that the user is doing. However, the assumptions and decisions of such systems are often false. Affective interaction can solve this kind of problems by observing the user’s behaviour and emotions after a change and adapting accordingly. For example if the user is happy when the software checks the spelling of some text, the system will continue doing the spell-checking process until the user is unhappy or gets frustrated about it. In the later case, the system will either disable spell-checking or adapt in some other way.
Sensors that are used to detect the affective information are either passive or require the user’s intent. Passive sensors though raise some privacy concerns and sometimes users prefer to express an emotion intentionally to a computer interface [1]. The devices that record and communicate affective information must be comfortable and not disruptive. For this purpose some prototypes were developed such as the Pressure Sensitive Mice (SqueezeMouse) and Frustration Feedback Widgets (Frustrometer).
Affective interfaces are often divided into 3 categories [3]: 1) those that express emotions, 2) those that process emotions and use affect as part of the system’s intelligence and 3) those that attempt to understand emotions. User evaluation is not done very often and sometimes it’s not clearly defined and understood what should be evaluated in a user study. Design of such systems should involve the user in all stages to constantly receive feedback. A user-centered approach to affective interaction involves the user in the so called affective loop. In an affective loop [4], users express their emotions to a system through their psysical bodily, behaviour regardless if it was felt at that moment or not. As the system responds through suitable feedback the users get more involved with their expressions.
Affective Interaction is a field for which no much research has been done yet. Some debated that interface characters used in affective interaction violate good usability principles [3] and confuse designers and users, whereas others insist the affective interaction is essential in order to please the user. However, it is a new field that will continue to grow as technology makes it possible to detect emotions and process them to entertain and please the user during their experience with interfaces. The user in turn, should be involved in the design of such systems to provide feedback that is necessary to improve the system and to understand its weaknesses.
http://www.cs.chalmers.se/idc/ituniv/kurser/04/projektkurs/artiklar/TR-541.
[2] Ana Paiva, Affective Interactions: Toward a New Generation of Computer Interfaces?
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=N3D84amSg50C&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&sig=Uy1pofGuGUqptzi4xpCAK5rr3Rs&dq=Affective+interaction#PPA3,M1
[3] Kristina Hook, Evaluation of Affective Interfaces
http://www.sics.se/safira/publications/P-AAMAS-Hook.pdf
[4] Petra Sundstrom, Anna Stahl & Kristina Hook, A User-Centered Approach to Affective Interaction
http://eprints.sics.se/149/01/kina.pdf
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