SentioScape: Facilitating Effective Cross-Cultural Communication through Emotional Mixed Reality

Increasing global migration has led to the rapid growth of interactions between organizations, groups, and individuals from various cultures. As such, knowing how to decode communication involving conversational partners from other cultures is essential in avoiding misunderstandings and needless conflicts. We present SentioScape, a Mixed Reality (MR) system for aiding emotional expression and understanding to foster more effective cross-cultural communication. The system allows co-located users to customize their own abstract visual representations of their emotions and perceive those of another person. 20 participants took part in an experiment to evaluate the system, with preliminary results revealing some positive trends that suggest the system has potential as a tool for creating more effective emotional communication between high- and low-context communicators.