Textual Affect Communication and Evocation Using Abstract Generative Visuals

In order to facilitate interaction in computer-mediated communication and enrich user experience in general, we introduce a novel textual emotion visualization approach, grounded in generative art and evocative visuals. The approach is centered on the idea that affective computer systems should be able to relate to, communicate, and evoke human emotions. It maps emotions identified in the text to evocative abstract animation. We examined two visualizations based on our approach and two common textual emotion visualization techniques, chat emoticons and avatars, along three dimensions: emotion communication, emotion evocation, and overall user enjoyment. Our study, organized as repeated measures within-subject experiment, demonstrated that in terms of emotion communication, our visualizations are comparable with emoticons and avatars. However, our main visualization based on abstract color, motion, and shape proved to be the best in evoking emotions. In addition, in terms of the overall user enjoyment, it gave results comparable with emoticons, but better than avatars.