1. Feeling: Emotional Closeness
YourGlove
Daniel Gooch
Leon Watts
Many people have to cope with routine separation from their loved ones. Taking a familiar social behaviour and modelling it for telecommunication could help to support these relationships by fostering a sense of intimacy. As many of the acts involved in close personal relationships involve touch, we want to explore ways of modelling touch and its consequences for feelings of emotional closeness. The YourGlove design project is intended to model the emotional meaning of hand-holding as a haptic experience.
Feeling: Emotional Closeness
We anticipate two basic situations in which YourGlove might play a role in emotionally significant relationships:
Whilst chatting ( /IM/VOIP), they want to share physical touch.
Whilst online but not actively communicating, one partner ‘holds out a hand’ in the hope that they will find the other there.
Context of Use
The YourGlove design is intended to approximate the emotional meaning of handholding by selectively modelling elements of this reciprocal act. We considered how an interaction might incorporate the ‘giving’ nature of handholding (as a gift), the physical sense of a grasp, and a sense of the uniqueness of the other person.
Focused on creating a recognisably familiar reciprocal social behaviour.
Created a simple articulated carrier frame for a glove that has been worn and given by the other partner.
Avoided attempting to construct an android prosthesis with a skin-like tactile qualities.
Design Concept
The hand mechanism is constructed as a modified robotic hand, with electric motors that operate the fingers via pulleys under computer control with a Phidget interface board.
A switch is mounted onto each of the YourGlove hands and connected to the computer. When a single hand is held, the partner hand closes and vice versa. The overall effect is to simulate real-world hand holding.
Design
Future Work
YourGlove is one of several design studies in our research on technologically mediated emotional intimacy. Although this system has not been formally evaluated, it has attracted many comments in informal groups, primarily of the `creepy' and `weird’ variety. In other words, we have not yet found the right balance between behavioural meaning and ‘uncanny’ realism. We shall further examine the way behaviour and materials interact to create an emotionally meaningful sense of the other at a distance, as part of their socioemotional presence.