Interactive Plants: Multisensory Visual-Tactile Interaction Enhances Emotional Experience

Takashi Yamauchi, Jinsil Hwaryoung Seo and Annie Sungkajun
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Takashi Yamauchi: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77845, USA
Jinsil Hwaryoung Seo: Department of Visualization, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77845, USA
Annie Sungkajun: Department of Visualization, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77845, USA

Mathematics, 2018, vol. 6, issue 11, 1-18

Abstract: Using a multisensory interface system, we examined how people’s emotional experiences change as their tactile sense (touching a plant) was augmented with visual sense (“seeing” their touch ). Our system (the Interactive Plant system) senses the electrical capacitance of the human body and visualizes users’ tactile information on a flat screen (when the touch is gentle, the program draws small and thin roots around the pot; when the touch is more harsh or abrupt, big and thick roots are displayed). We contrasted this multimodal combination (touch + vision) with a unimodal interface (touch only or watch only) and measured the impact of the multimodal interaction on participants’ emotion. We found significant emotional gains in the multimodal interaction. Participants’ self-reported positive affect, joviality, attentiveness and self-assurance increased dramatically in multimodal interaction relative to unimodal interaction; participants’ electrodermal activity (EDA) increased in the multimodal condition, suggesting that our plant-based multisensory visual-tactile interaction raised arousal. We suggest that plant-based tactile interfaces are advantageous for emotion generation because haptic perception is by nature embodied and emotional.

Keywords: interactive plants; capacitive sensor; electrodermal activity; multimodal interfaces; embodied cognition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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