The Heat is On: A Temperature Display for Conveying Affective Feedback

Abstract

Previous research has investigated whether temperature can augment a range of media including music, images and video. We describe the first experiment to investigate whether temperature can augment emotion conveyed by text messages. A challenge in prior work has been ensuring users can discern different thermal signals. We present an improved technique for thermal feedback that uses an array of three thermal stimulators. We demonstrate that the Thermal Array Display (TAD) increases users' ability to identify temperatures within a narrower range, compared to using a single thermal stimulator. While text messages dominate valence in the absence of context for temperature, the TAD consistently..