Affective Circles combines the Chat Circles 2 interface with affective information to enhance online communication.
Traditional chat interfaces present only textual content, giving a sparse channel over which human users may communicate. Some systems, like Chat Circles 2, add graphical avatars that permit users to express meaning with shape, color, motion, and position. Still, such tools do not begin to approach the subtlety and depth of face-to-face human interaction.
Video chat and conferencing systems attempt to address this deficit by providing the sound and moving images of remote parties. The highest-quality video and audio bring the conversation close in many ways to in-person interaction. However, in the process, they destroy much of what makes text-only chat powerful; it's hard to control fully what you present in a rich channel like video. Text chat provides a venue for performance and facilitates many-to-many interaction in a way that video struggles to match.
Affective Circles strives to preserve the possibilities of textual chat while providing additional cues that facilitate social interaction and collective decision-making. The first such cue we have built into the system is skin conductivity, sometimes called galvanic skin response. Skin conductivity measures general emotional arousal, but not emotional valence. This means that it rises when you are excited or agitated, but it's impossible to tell from the reading whether you are joyful, upset, worried, or feeling something else entirely. Laughing and being surprised tend to raise your skin conductivity level suddenly, so we believe it will provide useful feedback in a chat environment. ("Did others find my joke funny, or didn't they get it?")
Signals
Skin conductivity may help the user understand the state of remote other users, but it's not a signal that we can usually read even in face-to-face conversation, which we typically consider the richest form of interpersonal communication. Part of the goal of Affective Circles is to study the effect of normally hidden indicators, like skin conductivity, on conversation.
In the future, Affective Circles will integrate more affective information, such as keyboard pressure as users type.
Design
Chat Circles 2 has two main views: Chat and History. Chat displays users as circular avatars that they may move around the space. Users select the color of their avatar when they sign in; their comments appear inside their circles. In Affective Circles, the brightness and saturation of the user's color vary with his or her skin conductivity. When skin conductivity is high, indicating that the user is emotionally aroused, the circle becomes brighter and more saturated.
The History view shows a vertical timeline representing the chat session since the user logged in. Horizontal bars indicate when the user made a comment. Affective Circles colors users' timelines based on their skin conductivity from moment to moment. Thus, you can see at a glance when a user was, perhaps, excited, surprised, or upset. The timeline view makes it easy to notice when comments triggered strong reactions. Since the Chat Circles 2 History view presents all users' timelines side by side, you can see how the emotional arousal of the chatters varies (or doesn't vary) together.
HISTORY VIEW, Affective Circles |
HISTORY VIEW, Chat Circles 2 |
Studies
Joan DiMicco is conducting an initial study of how the introduction of skin conductivity information changes conversations. Her current study uses Conductive Chat, an instant messaging interface modified to color message text based on the user's skin conductivity state as he or she types.
Future studies will examine how the addition of affective signals to the chat environment improves the experience of conversation. We also wish to study how these new signals alter the decision-making process in online collaboration.
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