Showing emotions through movement and symmetry

This paper proposes and explores a minimalist abstract approach to express emotions through movement and symmetry, which intends to minimize the user’s expectations. Emotions are represented in terms of arousal and valence dimensions and they are visually expressed in a simple way through the behaviour and appearance of a series of dynamic horizontal and vertical lines. In particular, the arousal value is expressed through the movement of these lines, while the valence value is expressed through their symmetry. The line movement is controlled by a flocking algorithm which is influenced by the arousal value, while the line symmetry/asymmetry is expressed through their rotation and length. Furthermore, the paper describes a user experiment which investigated whether the arousal and valence expressed by our model are appropriately perceived by the users or not. The results suggest that combinations of movement and symmetry are perceived correctly as particular emotions, that movement and symmetry are perceived as arousal and valence respectively and that they are independent of each other.