Highlighted Projects (Fonte )
Affective Learning Companion
Developing learning experiences that facilitate self-actualization and creativity is among the most important goals of our society in preparation for the future. To facilitate deep understanding—learners must have the opportunity to develop multiple and flexible perspectives. The process of becoming an expert involves failure, understanding failure, and the motivation to move onward. Meta-cognitive awareness and personal strategies can play a role in developing an individual’s ability to persevere through failure and combat other diluting influences. This research develops theory and a new system for using affective sensing and appropriate relational-agent interactions to support learning and meta-cognitive strategies for perseverance through failure. We are investigating, designing, building, and evaluating relational agents that may act as intelligent tutors, virtual peers, or a group of virtual friends to support learning, creativity, playful imagination, motivation, and to pursue the development of meta-cognitive skills that persist beyond interaction with the technology.

Affective Tangibles
People naturally express frustration through the use of their motor skills. The purpose of the Affective Tangibles project is to develop physical objects that can be grasped, squeezed, thrown, or otherwise manipulated via a natural display of affect. Current tangibles include a PressureMouse, affective pinwheels that are mapped to skin conductivity, and a voodoo doll that can be shaken to express frustration. We have found that people often increase the intensity of muscle movements when experiencing frustrating interactions.

Affective-Cognitive Framework for Learning and Decision-Making
Recent affective neuroscience and psychology indicate that human affect and emotional experience play a significant, and useful, role in human learning and decision-making. Most machine learning and decision-making models, however, are based on old, purely cognitive models, and are slow, brittle, and awkward to adapt. We aim to redress many of these classic problems by developing new models that integrate affect with cognition. Ultimately, such improvements will allow machines to make smart and more human-like decisions for better human-machine interactions.

Combining Multiple Modalities to Detect Learner's Interest
We are interested in combining multiple modalities to detect affect. So far, most of the work in affective computing focuses on only a single channel of information. This work extends earlier work by incorporating information from multiple modalities. The problem is posed as a combination of classifiers in a probabilistic framework that naturally explains the concepts of experts and critics. Each channel of data has an expert associated that generates the beliefs about the correct class using only that modality. Probabilistic models of error and the critics, which predict the performance of the individual expert on the current input, are used to combine the experts' beliefs about the correct class. We demonstrate the multi-sensor classification scheme on the task of detecting the affective state of interest in children trying to solve a puzzle. The sensory information from the face, the postures and the state of the puzzle are combined in a probabilistic framework and we demonstrate that this method achieves a much better recognition accuracy than classification based on individual channels. Further, the critic-driven averaging, which is a special case of the proposed framework, outperforms all the other classifier combination methods applied to this problem.

Digital Story Explication as it Relates to Emotional Needs and Learning
This project aims to address emotional needs and develop emotional intelligence. The system, G.I.R.L.S. Talk (Girls Involved in Real Life Sharing), will allow users to reflect actively upon the emotions related to their situations through the construction of pictorial narratives. Users will be able to gain new knowledge and understanding about themselves and others through the exploration of authentic and personal experiences. The system will employ new, common-sense reasoning technology, enabling it to infer affective content from the users' stories and support emotional reflection. A similar story will be extracted from the database and displayed to the users, allowing them to hear real stories, share their feelings and experiences, and reflect upon these in relation to their personal situations. We expect that such reflection will facilitate development of new perspectives on dealing with life's events.

EmoteMail
EmoteMail is an email client that is augmented to convey aspects of the state of the writer during the composition of email to the recipient. The client captures facial expressions and typing speed and introduces them as design elements. These contextual cues provide extra information that can help the recipient decode the tone of the email. Moreover, the contextual information is gathered and automatically embedded as the sender composes the email, allowing an additional channel of expression.

Emotional DJ
The technology in this project changes facial expressions in videos without the system knowing anything in particular about the person's face ahead of time. There are a few reasons to create something like this: first, it provides an artistic tool with which to alter photos or videos; second, it could be set up to let people open-endedly explore their facial communication and expressiveness by playing with a real-time video of their own current face; finally, if made to work with regular video, it would be useful to demonstrate an unexpected way in which we can't always trust the video information we love to consume.

Guilt Detection
The goal of this project is to produce a guilt detector. We have created an experiment that is designed to produce feelings of guilt of varying levels in different groups while we record EKG and skin conductivity. By examining the differences in physiology across the conditions, we hope to build a classifier to determine which condition, and thus which level of guilt, an individual is experiencing.

INNER-active Journal
The purpose of the INNER-active Journal system is to provide a way for users to reconstruct their emotions around events in their lives, and to see how recall of these events affects their physiology. Expressive writing, a task in which the participant is asked to write about extremely emotional events, is presented as a means towards story construction. Previous use of expressive writing has shown profound benefits for both psychological and physical health. In this system, measures of skin conductivity, instantaneous heart rate, and heart stress entropy are used as indicators of activities occurring in the body. Users have the ability to view these signals after taking part in an expressive writing task.

Moral Sensors
The computer's emerging capacity to communicate an individual's affect raises critical ethical concerns. Additionally, designers of perceptual computer systems face moral decisions about how the information gathered by computers with sensors can be used. As humans, we have ethical considerations that come into play when we observe and report each other's behavior. Computers, as they are currently designed, do not employ such ethical considerations. The subject of this project will be evaluations that assess the ethical acceptability of perceptual computers. The goal is to make a perceptual computer that behaves ethically, in the eyes of its users. More specifically, this project will conduct a series of evaluations of systems that mediate the communication of affect motivated by different ethical philosophies.

Mouse-Behavior Analysis and Adaptive Relational Agents
The goal of this project is to develop tools to sense and adapt to a user's affective state based on his or her mouse behavior. We are developing algorithms to detect frustration level for use in usability studies. We are also exploring how more permanent personality characteristics and changes in mood are reflected in the user’s mouse behavior. Ultimately, we seek to build adaptive relational agents that tailor their interactions with the user based on these sensed affective states.

Pattern Recognition and Learning
This project develops basic theories and tools that enable computers to make inferences from data, such as determining a user's affective states. The approach is Bayesian: formulating probabilistic models on the basis of domain knowledge and training data, and then performing inference according to the rules of probability theory. Bayesian approaches have been implemented in the context of curve fitting, mixture-density estimation, principal-components analysis (PCA), automatic relevance determination, and spectral analysis. Current work has yielded a Bayesian spectral analysis tool for nonstationary and non-evenly sampled signals, such as electrocardiogram (EKG) signals, which outperforms other known methods. We have developed a new adaptive Monte Carlo method, which can be applied to any generalized linear model and which greatly speeds up the sampling process. Additionally, we have proposed a new, principled way to combine multiple classifiers in a Bayesian framework. Recently, we have developed Bayesian conditional random fields for joint classification of structured data, such as sequences, images, and webs.

Personal Heart-Stress Monitor
The saying, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it" may be appropriate for stress. Many people are unaware of their stress level, and of what is good or bad for it. The issue is complicated by the fact that while too much stress is unhealthy, a certain amount of stress can be healthy as it motivates and energizes. The "right" level varies with temperment, task, and other factors, many of which are unknown. There seems to be no data analyzing how stress levels vary for the average healthy individual, over day-to-day activities. We would like to build a device that helps to gather and present data for improving an individual's understanding of both healthy and unhealthy stress in his or her life. The device itself should be comfortable and should not increase the user's stress. (It is noteworthy that stress monitoring is also important in human-computer interaction for testing new designs.) Currently, we are building a new, wireless, stress-mornitoring system by integrating Fitsense's heart-rate sensors and Motorola's iDen cell phone with our heart-rate-variability estimation algorithm.

Posture Recognition Chair
We have developed a system to recognize posture patterns and associated affective states in real time, in an unobtrusive way, from a set of pressure sensors on a chair. This system discriminates states of children in learning situations, such as when the child is interested, or is starting to take frequent breaks and looking bored. The system uses pattern recognition techniques, while watching natural behaviors, to "learn" what behaviors tend to accompany which states. The system thus detects the surface-level behaviors (postures) and their mappings during a learning situation in an unobtrusive manner so that they don't interfere with the natural learning process. Through the chair, we can reliably detect nine static postures, and four temporal patterns associated with affective states.

Robotic Computer
A robotic computer that moves its monitor "head" and "neck," but that has no explicit face, is being designed to interact with users in a natural way for applications such as learning, rapport-building, interactive teaching, and posture improvement. In all these applications, the robot will need to move in subtle ways that express its state and promote appropriate movements in the user, but that don't distract or annoy. Toward this goal, we are giving the system the ability to recognize and have subtle expressions.

Wearable Relational Devices for Stress Monitoring
This research aims to build a system for data collection, annotation, and feedback that is part of a longer-term research plan to gather data to understand more about stress and physiological signals involved in its expression. The first phase consists of building a wearable apparatus for gathering data. The challenge here is getting as many accurate labels (annotations) from the user as possible, while he or she goes about natural daily activities. The problem is that getting such annotations is disruptive, and is itself likely to increase stress, which can interfere with the signals being measured, and make users less likely to collect a lot of data. The hypothesis is that some ways of interrupting would be less stressful than others. Thus, the second phase focuses on implementing different means of interrupting the user for annotations. These ways will be informed by prior results on both relational and attentional strategies. Overall, this research should contribute not only a new system for gathering annotations useful for studies of stress, but also to provide new insights into the value of using relational/attentional strategies in a task that involves a large number of interruptions.

Prior Projects:

AboutFace

AboutFace is a user-dependent system that is able to learn patterns and discriminate the different facial movements characterizing confusion and interest. The system uses a piezoelectric sensor to detect eyebrow movements and begins with a training session to calibrate the unique values for each user. After the training session, the system uses these levels to develop an expression profile for the individual user. The system has many potential uses, ranging from computer and video-mediated conversations to interactions with computer agents. This system is an alternative to using camera-based computer vision analysis to detect faces and expressions. Additionally, when communicating with other people, users of this system also have the option of conveying their expressions anonymously by wearing a pair of glasses that conceals their expressions and the sensing device.

Adaptive, Wireless, Signal Detection and Decoding
In this project, we propose a new Bayesian receiver for signal detection in flat-fading channels. First, the detection problem is formulated as an inference problem in a hybrid dynamic system that has both continuous and discrete variables. Then, an expectation propagation algorithm is proposed to address the inference problem. As an extension of belief propagation, expectation propagation efficiently approximates a Bayesian estimation by iteratively propagating information between different nodes in the dynamic system and projecting exact messages into the exponential family. Compared to sequential Monte Carlo filters and smoothers, the new method has much lower computational complexity since it makes analytically deterministic approximations instead of Monte Carlo approximations. Our simulations demonstrate that the new receiver achieves accurate detection without the aid of any training symbols or decision feedbacks. Future work involves joint decoding and channel estimation, where convolutional codes are used to protect signals from noise corruption. Initial results are promising.

Affect in Speech: Assembling a Database
The aim of this project is to build a database of natural speech showing a range of affective variability. It is an extension of our ongoing research focused on building models for automatic detection of affect in speech. At a very basic level, training such systems requires a large corpus of speech containing a range of emotional vocal variation. A traditional approach to this research has been to assemble databases where actors have provided the affective variation on demand. However, this method often results in unnatural sounding speech and/or exaggerated expressions. We have developed a prototype of an interactive system that guides a user through a question and answer session. Without any rehearsals or scripts, the user navigates through touch and spoken language an interface guided by embodied conversational agents which prompt the user to speak about an emotional experience. Some of the issues we are addressing include the design of the text and character behavior (including speech and gesture) so as to obtain a convincing and disclosing interaction with the user.

Affective Carpet
The "Affective Carpet" is a soft, deformable surface made of cloth and foam, which detects continuous pressure with excellent sensitivity and resolution. It is being used as an interface for projects in affective expression, including as a controller to measure a musical performer's direction and intensity in leaning and weight-shifting patterns.

Affective Mirror
The Affective Mirror is an attempt to build a fully automated system that intelligently responds to a person's affective state in real time. Current work is focused on building an agent that realistically mirrors a person's facial expression and posture. The agent detects affective cues through a facial-feature tracker and a posture-recognition system developed in the Affective Computing group; based on what affect a person is displaying, such as interest, boredom, frustration, or confusion, the system responds with matching facial affect and/or posture. This project is designed to be integrated into the Learning Companion Project, as part of an early phase of showing rapport-building behaviors between the computer agent and the human learner.

Affective Social Quest
ASQ investigates ways to teach social-emotion skills to children interactively with toys. One of the first goals is to help autistic children recognize expressions of emotion in social situations. The system uses four "dwarfs" expressing sad, happy, surprise, and angry, and each communicates wirelessly to the system and detects which plush doll was selected by the child. The computer plays short entertaining video clips displaying examples of the four emotions and cues the child to pick a dwarf that closely matches that emotion. Future work includes improving the ability of the system to recognize direct displays of emotion by the child.

Affective Tigger
The Affective Tigger is a plush toy designed to recognize and react to certain emotinal behaviors of its playmate. For example the toy enters a state of "happy," moving its ears upward and emitting a happy vocalization when it recognizes that the child has postured the toy upright and is bouncing it along the floor. Tigger has five such states, involving recognizing and responding with an emotional behavior. The resulting behavior Tigger demonstrates allows it to serve as an affective mirror for the child's expression. This work involved designing the toy, and evaluating sessions of play with it with dozens of kids. The toy was shown to successfully communicate some aspects of emotion, and to prompt behaviors that are interesting to researchers trying to learn about the development of human emotional skills such as empathy.

AffQuake
AffQuake is an attempt to incorporate signals that relate to a player's affect into ID Software's Quake II in a way that alters game play. Several modifications have been made that cause the player's avatar within Quake to alter its behaviors depending upon one of these signals. In StartleQuake, when a player becomes startled, his or her avatar also becomes startled and jumps back. Quake changes the size of the player's avatar in relation to the user's response as well, representing player excitement by average skin conductivity level, and growing the avatar's size when this level is high.

Automatic Facial Expression Analysis
Recognizing non-verbal cues, which constitute a large percentage of our communication, is a prime facet of building emotionally intelligent systems. Facial expressions and movements such as a smile or a nod are used either to fulfill a semantic function, to communicate emotions, or as conversational cues. We are developing an automatic tool using computer vision and various machine-learning techniques, which can detect the different facial movements and head gestures of people while they are interacting naturally with the computer. Past work on this project determined techniques to track upper facial features (eyes and eyebrows) and detect facial actions corresponding to those features (eyes squintint or widening, eyebrows raised). The ongoing project is expanding its scope to track and detect facial actions corresponding to the lower features. Further, we hope to integrate the facial expression analysis module with other sensors developed by the Affective Computing group to reliably detect and recognize different emotions.

BioMod
BioMod is an integrated interface for users of mobile and wearable devices, monitoring various physiological signals such as the electrocardiogram, with the intention of providing useful and comfortable feedback about medically important information. The first version of this system includes new software for monitoring stress and its impact on heart functioning, and the ability to wirelessly communicate this information over a Motorola cell phone. One application under development is the monitoring of stress in patients who desire to stop smoking: the system will alert an "on-call" trained behavior-change assistant when the smoker is exhibiting physiological patterns indicative of stress or likely relapse, offering an opportunity for encouraging intervention at a point of weakness. Challenges in this project include the development of an interface that is easy and efficient to use on the go, is sensitive to user feelings about the nature of the information being communicated, and accurately recognizes the patterns of physiological signals related to the conditions of interest.

Car Phone Stress
We are building a system that can watch for certain signs of stress in drivers, specifically stress related to talking on the car phone, as may be caused by increased mental workload. To gather data for training and testing our system, subjects were asked to 'drive' in a simulator past several curves while keeping their speed close to a predetermined desired constant value. In some cases they were simultaneously asked to listen to random numbers from a speech-synthesis software and to perform simple mathematical tasks over a telephone headset. Several measures drawn from the subjects' driving behavior were examined as possible indicators of the subjects' performance and of their mental workload. When subjects were instructed (by a visible sign) to brake, most braked within 0.7-1.4 seconds after the sign came into view. However, in a significant number of incidents, subjects never braked or braked 1.5-3.5 seconds after the message; almost all of these incidents were when subjects were on the phone. On average, we found that drivers on the phone braked 10% slower than when not on the phone; additionally, the variance in their braking time was four times higher -- suggesting that although delayed driver reactions were infrequent, when delays happened they could be large and potentially dangerous. Furthermore, their infrequency could create a false sense of security. In future experiments, subjects' physiological data will be analyzed jointly with measures of workload, stress and performance.

Cardiac PAF Detection and Prediction
PAF (paroxysmal atrial fibrillation) is a dangerous form of cardiac arrhythmia that poses severe health risks, sometimes leading to heart attacks, the recognized number-one killer in the developed world. The technical challenges for detecting and predicting PAF include accurate sensing, speedy analysis, and a workable classification system. To address these issues, electrocardiogram (ECG) data from the PhysioNet Online Database will be analyzed using new spectrum estimation techniques to develop a program able to predict, as well as recognize, the onset of specific cardiac arrhythmias such as PAF. The system could then be incorporated into wearable/mobile medical devices, allowing for interventions before cardiac episodes occur, and potentially saving many lives.

Conductive Chat
While instant messaging clients are frequently and widely used for interpersonal communication, they lack the richness of face-to-face conversations. Without the benefit of eye contact and other non-verbal "back-channel feedback," text-based chat users frequently resort to typing "emoticons" and extraneous punctuation in an attempt to incorporate contextual affect information in the text communication. Conductive Chat is an instant messenger client that integrates users' changing skin conductivity levels into their typewritten dialogue. Skin conductivity level (also referred to as galvanic skin response) is frequently used as a measure of emotional arousal, and high levels are correlated with cognitive states such as high stress, excitement, and attentiveness. On an expressive level, Conductive Chat communicates information about each user's arousal in a consistent, intuitive manner, without needing explicit controls or explanations. On a communication-theory level, this new communication channel allows for more "media rich" conversations without requiring more work from the users.

Detection and Analysis of Driver Stress
Driving is an ideal test bed for detecting stress in natural situations. Four types of physiological signals (electrocardiogram, electromyogram, respiration, and skin conductivity related to autonomic nervous system activation) were collected in a natural driving situation under various driving conditions. The occurrence of natural stressors was designed into the driving task and validated using driver self-report, real-time, third-party observations, and independently coded video records of road conditions and facial expression. Features reflecting heart-rate variability derived from the adaptive Bayesian spectrum estimation, the rate of skin-conductivity orienting responses, and the spectral characteristics of respiration were extracted from the data. Initial pattern-recognition results show separation for the three types of driving states: rest, city, and highway, and some discrimination within states for cases in which the state precedes or follows a difficult turn-around or toll situation. These results yielded from 89-96 percent accuracy in recognizing stress level. We are currently investigating new, advanced means of modeling the driver data.

Gene Expression Data Analysis
This research aims to classify gene expression data sets into different categories, such as normal vs. cancer. The main challenge is that thousands of genes are measured in the micro-array data, while only a small subset of genes are believed to be relevant for disease classification. We have developed a novel approach called "predictive automatic relevance determination;" this method brings Bayesian tools to bear on the problem of selecting which genes are relevant, and extends our earlier work on the development of the "expectation propagation" algorithm. In our simulations, the new method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, including support-vector machines with feature selection and relevance-vector machines.

Interface Tailor
The Interface Tailor is an agent that attempts to adapt a system in response to affective feedback. Frustration is being used as a fitness function to select between a wide variety of different system behaviors. Currently, the Microsoft Office Assistant (or Paperclip) is one example interface that is being made more adaptive. Ultimately the project seeks to provide a generalized framework for making all software more tailor-able.

Learning Companion
"I can't do this" and "I'm not good at this" are common statements made by kids while trying to learn. Usually triggered by affective states of confusion, frustration, and hopelessness, these statements represent some of the greatest problems left unaddressed by educational reform. Education has emphasized conveying a great deal of information and facts, and has not modeled the learning process. When teachers present material to the class, it is usually in a polished form that omits the natural steps of making mistakes (feeling confused), recovering from them (overcoming frustration), deconstructing what went wrong (not becoming dispirited), and finally starting over again (with hope and maybe even enthusiasm). Learning naturally involves failure and a host of associated affective responses. This project aims to build a computerized learning companion that facilitates the child's own efforts at learning. The goal of the companion is to help keep the child's exploration going, by occasionally prompting with questions or feedback, and by watching and responding to the affective state of the child—watching especially for signs of frustration and boredom that may precede quitting, for signs of curiosity or interest that tend to indicate active exploration, and for signs of enjoyment and mastery, which might indicate a successful learning experience. The companion is not a tutor that knows all the answers but rather a player on the side of the student, there to help him or her learn, and in so doing, learn how to learn better.

Mr. Java: Customer Support
Mr. Java is the Media Lab's wired coffee machine, which keeps track of usage patterns and user preferences. The focus of this project is to give Mr. Java a tangible customer-feedback system that collects data on user complaints or compliments. "Thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" pressure sensors were built and their signals integrated with the state of the machine to gather data from customers regarding their ongoing experiences with the machine. Potentially, the data gathered can be used to learn how to improve the system. The system also portrays an affective, social interface to the user: helpful, polite, and attempting to be responsive to any problems reported.

Online Emotion Recognition
This project is aimed at building a system to recognize emotional expression given four physiological signals. Data was gathered from a graduate student with acting experience as she intentionally tried to experience eight different emotional states daily over a period of several weeks. Several features are extracted from each of her physiological signals. The first classifiers gave a classification result of 88% success when discriminating among 3 emotions (pure chance would be 33.3%), and of 51% when discriminating among 8 emotions (pure chance 12.5%). New, improved classifiers reach an 81% success rate when discriminating among all 8 emotions. Furthermore, an online classifier has now been built using the old method, which gives a success rate only 8% less than its old offline counterpart (i.e. 43%). We expect this percentage to sharply increase when the new methods are adapted to run online.

Recognizing Affect in Speech
This research project is concerned with building computational models for the automatic recognition of affective expression in speech. We are in the process of completing an investigation of how acoustic parameters extracted from the speech waveform (related to voice quality, intonation, loudness and rhythm) can help disambiguate the affect of the speaker without knowledge of the textual component of the linguistic message. We have carried out a multi-corpus investigation, which includes data from actors and spontaneous speech in English, and evaluated the model's performance. In particular, we have shown that the model exhibits a speaker-dependent performance which reflects human evaluation of these particular data sets, and, held against human recognition benchmarks, the model begins to perform competitively.

Relational Agents
Relational Agents are computational artifacts designed to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with their users. Central to the notion of relationship is that it is a persistent construct, spanning multiple interactions. Thus, Relational Agents are explicitly designed to remember past history and manage future expectations in their interactions with users. Since face-to-face conversation is the primary context of relationship-building for humans, our work focuses on Relational Agents as a specialized kind of embodied conversational agent (animated humanoid software agents that use speech, gaze, gesture, intonation, and other nonverbal modalities to emulate the experience of human face-to-face conversation). One major achievement was the development of a Relational Agent for health behavior change, specifically in the area of exercise adoption. A study involving 100 subjects interacting with this agent over one month demonstrated that trusting, caring relationships can be developed, and that such agents can be used to achieve beneficial behavior change outcomes.

The Conductor's Jacket
The Conductor's Jacket is a unique wearable device that measures physiological and gestural signals. Together with the Gesture Construction, a musical software system, it interprets these signals and applies them expressively in a musical context. Sixteen sensors have been incorporated into the Conductor's Jacket in such a way as to not encumber or interfere with the gestures of a working orchestra conductor. The Conductor's Jacket system gathers up to sixteen data channels reliably at rates of 3 kHz per channel, and also provides real-time graphical feedback. Unlike many gesture-sensing systems it not only gathers positional and accelerational data but also senses muscle tension from several locations on each arm. We will demonstrate the Gesture Construction, a musical software system that analyzes and performs music in real-time based on the performer's gestures and breathing signals. A bank of software filters extract several of the features that were found in the conductor study, including beat intensities and the alternation between arms. These features are then used to generate real-time expressive effects by shaping the beats, tempos, articulations, dynamics, and note lengths in a musical score.

The Galvactivator
The galvactivator is a glove-like wearable device that senses the wearer's skin conductivity and maps its values to a bright LED display. Increases in skin conductivity across the palm tend to be good indicators of physiological arousal, causing the galvactivator display to glow brightly. The galvactivator has many potentially useful purposes, ranging from self-feedback for stress management, to facilitation of conversation between two people, to new ways of visualizing mass excitement levels in performance situations or visualizing aspects of arousal and attention in learning situations. One of the findings in mass-communication settings was that people tended to "glow" when a new speaker came onstage, and during live demos, laughter, and live audience interaction. They tended to "go dim" during powerpoint presentations. In smaller educational settings, students have commented on how they tend to glow when they are more engaged with learning.

Touch-Phone
The Touch-Phone was developed to explore the use of objects to mediate the emotional exchange in interpersonal communication. Through an abstract visualization of screen-based color changes, a standard telephone is modified to communicate how it is being held and squeezed. The telephone receiver includes a touch-sensitive surface which conveys the user's physical response over a computer network. The recipient sees a small colored icon on his computer screen which changes in real time according to the way his conversational partner is interacting with the telephone object.