Communicating emotions in online chat using physiological sensors and animated text

Abstract

We present a chat system that uses animated text associated with emotional information to show the affective state of the user. The system obtains the affective state of a chat user from a physiological sensor attached to the user's body. This paper describes preliminary experiments and provides examples of possible applications of our chat system. Observations from informal experiments comparing our animated chat system with a conventional system suggest that an online interface that conveys emotional information helps online users to interact with each other more efficiently. © 2004 ACM.