Understanding Emotional Expression with Haptic Feedback Vest Patterns and Immersive Virtual Reality

Haptic feedback vests afford a unique opportunity to enhance a user’s emotional engagement within the virtual world. In this paper, we present a two-stage study on user experience towards understanding emotional expression through utilizing the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance model and the International Affective Picture System. We examine an authoring survey with 40 young adults, where users contextualized five emotion groups and designed patterns to express the feelings associated with each stimulus. Our resulting content analysis suggests design themes on a body-mind situation axis and an internal-external location axis. We found that vibrotactile actuation extends user emotion through phenomena which we call scene emulation, body function emulation, emotional resemblance, and emotional reflection. Lastly, we pilot these findings through an immersive virtual reality experience.