Development of Manga-style Chat System Aiming to Communicate Nonverbal Expression

In this article, we propose a Manga-style chat system to transmit nonverbal information smoothly and visually based on techniques of Japanese comics. A character, pictographs, emoticons or smileys provide much information to viewers through their shapes or arrangements, so senders of messages are required to select the appropriate emotion not to give an unexpected impression from them. It is very troublesome for users to choose manually various emotions at each message during their chat. We aim to reduce users’ burdens and to provide an intuitive interface by adopting Japanese Manga-style to chat system. As a result of a comparison experiment with an existing chat system, it revealed that users could transmit nonverbal information in the same level and users had hardly any trouble in exchanging messages meanwhile our system can minimize the burden on choosing the emotions.