eMoto lets users send text messages between mobile phones, but in addition to text, the messages also have colorful and animated shapes in the background. The user writes the text-message and then chooses which expression to have in the background from a big palette of expressions mapped on a circle. The expressions are designed to convey emotional content along two axes: arousal and valence. For example, aggressive expressions have high arousal and negative valence and are portrayed as sharp, edgy shapes, in strong red colors, with quick sharp animated movements. To move around in the circle the user has to perform set of gestures using the stylus pen (that comes with some mobile phones) that the authors extended with sensors that could pick up on pressure and shaking movements. The pressure and shaking movements can act as a basis for most emotional gestures people do, a basis that allows users to build their own gestures on top of these general characteristics.
Source: Höök, K., Stahl, A., Sundström, P., and Laaksolaahti, J. 2008. Interactional empowerment. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’08). ACM Press, 647–656.
Sundström, P., Stahl, A., Höök, K. 2005 eMoto – Affectively Involving both Body and Mind. In Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA'05). ACM Press, 2005-2008
http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/1479/609
