Emotionscape: mediating spatial experience for emotion awareness and sharing

Abstract

We bring the concepts of emotional self-awareness and emotion sharing to the problem space of Mixed Reality and by adding our observations on the influence of the physical space on emotions, we speculate whether we can mediate the spatial experiences of collocated people to increase their emotional self-awareness and ease emotion sharing between them. Our study is structured around a conceptual system we designed, one that mediates the spatial attributes of the surroundings according to the user's and collocated people's emotional states. after the initial ideation of the concept, we built a prototype application for HoloLens. We then conducted a 2-legged user study with 12 participants; first we gathered data using an online survey, followed by a study with thinking aloud protocol using the prototype. We believe that the results and discussion we provide in this paper will be useful in development of emotionally aware Mixed Reality systems.