Award at CHI 2012 for our paper “Keep in Touch: Channel, Expectation and Experience”. It is the academic paper for the Huggy Pajama project.

Face-to-face communication remains the most powerful human interaction. In this day and age, people have become dependent on electronic devices to communicate with others leading to many interpersonal difficulties and miscommunications in today’s society. We believe that face-to-face communication remains the most powerful human interaction and these devices can never fully replace the intimacy and immediacy of people conversing in the same room. If society loses its physical aspect, many of the subtle benefits that go along with physical face-to-face contact will also be lost.

Much of communication is done non-verbally and emotions can easily be transferred from person to person without the utterance of a single word. Sound Perfume is our attempt to encourage face-to-face communication by making it more emotional and memorable. We do this by augmenting a person’s experience through additional auditory and olfactory stimuli during social encounters. We designed wearable actuators that provide each user the ability to handcraft their sound and scent identity.

This identity is then transferred to another system when two people meet, using a unique technique known as eye contact interaction, stimulating each person with their partners sound and smell preference. We have developed a working prototype designed in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses that help us demonstrate the interaction techniques and actuations. We also present an advanced design that is minimalistic in its use of components.

Mirroring is the behavior in which one person copies another person usually while in social interaction with them and is one of the most powerful ways to build rapport quickly. When meeting someone for the first time, mirroring their seating position, posture, body angle, gestures, expressions and tone of voice are some useful examples of doing this. Before long, your partner will start to feel that there’s something about you they like and they may even describe you as ‘easy to interact with’. This is because they see themselves reflected in you.

Lighting and scents have shown to have an important role in reinforcing special perception, activity and mood setting, emotion, judgments, and even social relationship. Light Perfume was designed to help people mirror each other using visual and olfactory outputs to strengthen a user’s psychological bond with the partner. We do this by synchronizing the speed and blinking color of LEDs and emit the same perfume scent from each person’s device during a face-to-face conversation. The outputs are chosen based on inputs from the user’s environment such as noise levels and expressive body gestures.

Light Perfume was designed in a bangle in order to directly stimulate a user’s eyes and unobtrusively stimulate a user’s nose from the wrist. It also is a perfect location for sensors that detect acceleration of the arms and sound from the surrounding area. The aroma is created by heating solid perfume and emitted by the movement of the wearer’s conscious and subconscious body gestures during a conversation.