HeartBees: Visualizing Crowd Affects

TL;DR

HeartBees is a bio-feedback visualization system that represents collective emotional states using bird flock metaphors, enhancing affective sharing and understanding through physiological data and interactive visualization.

Contribution

We introduce HeartBees, a novel bio-feedback system that visualizes collective emotions with a bird flock metaphor based on physiological sensing, grounded in affective computing.

Findings

Participants perceived the visualizations consistently.

The system effectively maps physiological signals to emotional states.

HeartBees fosters affective sharing and group coordination.

Abstract

Affective sharing within groups strengthens coordination and empathy, leads to better health outcomes, and increases productivity and performance. Existing tools for affective sharing face one main challenge: creating a representation of collective emotional states that is relatable and universally accessible. To overcome this challenge, we propose HeartBees, a bio-feedback system for visualizing collective emotional states, which maps a multi-dimensional emotion model into a metaphorical visualization of flocks of birds. Grounded on Affective Computing literature and physiological sensing, we mapped physiological indicators that could be obtained from wearable devices into a multi-dimensional emotion model, which, in turn, our HeartBees can make use of. We evaluated our nature-inspired interactive system with 353 online participants, whose responses showed good consensus in the way they subjectively perceived the visualizations. Last, we discuss practical applications of HeartBees.