Touch & talk

Abstract

Touch is a unique channel in affect conveyance. A significant aspect of this uniqueness is that the relation of touch to affect is immediate, without the need for symbolic encoding and decoding. However, most pioneering research work in developing remote touch technologies, result in the use of touch as a symbolic channel either by design or user decision. We present a review of relevant psychological and sociological literature of touch and propose a model of immediacy of the touch channel for conveyance of affect. We posit that the strategic provision of contextualizing channels will liberate touch to assume its role in affect conveyance. Armed with this analysis, we propose two design guidelines: first, the touch channel needs to be coupled with other communication channels to clarify its meaning; second, encourage the use touch as an immediate channel by not assigning any symbolic meaning to touch interactions. We proceed to describe our haptic interface design based on these guidelines. Our in-lab experiment shows that remote touch reinforces the meaning of a symbolic channel reducing sadness significantly and showing a trend to reduce general negative mood and to reinforce joviality.

Internet of touch

“…Our method demonstrates that different input methods can be used for generating similar vibrotactile sensations. Touch sensors and actuators may be used in remote social interactions for affective communication [9,21], but may also be useful in more specialized settings. One such setting is communication with visually impaired, or deaf-blind users [7,18,8,3], who may strongly benefit from tactile communication.…”

“…Gentle stroking touches applied with a velocity of between 1-10 cm/s have been suggested to be especially relevant in social-affective touch interactions [4,5,14]. Researchers have now begun to investigate how such social-affective aspects of touch can be used in HCI, for example for remote communication between partners [9,21], or in interactions with social robots [20].…”

Touch without Touching: Overcoming Social Distancing in Semi-Intimate Relationships with SansTouch

“…These mediated touch interactions were mainly designed for users with intimate relationships like couples or close friends, and mostly evaluated in the context of remote communications [17,28,31,35,48]. However, special circumstances like social distancing may restrict interpersonal touch communications even when users are co-located, for example when interacting with fragile patients in hospitals [21,39] or during a pandemic [41] like the COVID-19 outbreak that became a global pandemic in early 2020 [2].…”

“…However, robot-mediated touch devices often sufer from uncanny valley issues 1 [31]. Furthermore, these touch devices were mainly designed for and evaluated in the context of remote communications [17,28,31,35,48]. As such, their efectiveness and applicability when used during face-to-face communications remain unclear, especially since past research suggested that establishing face-to-face communications introduces diferent challenges compared to remote communications [6].…”

Electrical machine for remote kissing, and engineering measurement of its remote communication effects, including modified Turing test

“…Various haptic communication systems have been designed and developed by researchers over the years in order to integrate the touch channel in digital communication. These systems aim to enhance physical intimacy during remote interaction between people by stimulating the haptic sensations of hugging (Cheok, 2010;DiSalvo et al, 2003;Mueller et al, 2005;Kuwamura et al, 2013;Tsetserukou, 2010), handshaking (Park et al, 2014;Miyoshi et al, 2015;Avraham et al, 2012), hand holding (Gooch and Watts, 2012;O'Brien and Mueller, 2006;Chang et al, 2002), kissing (Hemmert et al, 2011;Takahashi et al, 2011b;Zhang et al, 2016) and other forms of interpersonal touch (Park et al, 2012;Wang and Quek, 2010;Singhal et al, 2017).…”