Identifying emotions expressed by mobile users through 2D surface and 3D motion gestures

Only intrusive and expensive ways of precisely expressing emotions has been proposed, which are not likely to appear soon in everyday Ubicomp environments. In this paper, we study to which extent we can identify the emotion a user is explicitly expressing through 2D and 3D gestures. Indeed users already often manipulate mobile devices with touch screen and accelerometers. We conducted a field study where we asked participants to explicitly express their emotion through gestures and to report their affective states. We contribute by (1) showing a high number of significant correlations in 3D motion descriptors of gestures and in the arousal dimension; (2) defining a space of affective gestures. We identify (3) groups of descriptors that structure the space and are related to arousal. Finally, we provide with (4) a preliminary model of arousal and we identify (5) interesting patterns in particular classes of gestures. Such results are useful for Ubicomp application designers in order to envision the use of gestures as a cheap and non-intrusive affective modality.