Assessment of the neck as a haptic surface for displaying vibrations for emotional responses

Abstract

Haptic technology is used in the game and media industry to augment a user's presence through touch related sensations. Affective haptic studies haptic feedbacks to elicit human’s emotion but, so far, no shared framework exists that states how to achieve this. By exploiting the correlation between the physiological changes in the body induced by the autonomic nervous system is a promising method but requires expensive and obtrusive devices. Striving for devices that are relatively inexpensive and easy to replicate we focuses our study on the neck. We argue that the neck has the peculiarity of being completely exposed and intimate hence the haptic feedback provided by vibroelectric motors are sufficient to trigger an emotional response in a user. To test our assumption we created a haptic device and a haptic dataset. We proved that our setup was indeed sufficient to elicit different emotional states in a user as meant by the circumplex model of emotion. We found that the intensity of vibration and the sequence in which the actuators are driven affect the arousal but not the valence. Instead the vibration affected both the \textit{arousal} and the valence. We discussed these limitation and offered a set of guidelines on haptic stimuli meant to ease the design of affective feedback for devices that employ an array of actuators.