Affective Affordance of Message Balloon Animations: An Early Exploration of AniBalloons

TL;DR

This paper explores AniBalloons, a new chat balloon animation system designed to enhance emotional expression in text communication, demonstrating high effectiveness in conveying intended emotions and broad emotional coverage.

Contribution

Introduces AniBalloons, a novel affective animation system for chat balloons, with an evaluation showing effective emotion conveyance and broad emotional range.

Findings

80% of animations effectively conveyed intended emotions

AniBalloons cover a broad range of emotional parameters

Potential to enhance emotional expressiveness in text communication

Abstract

We introduce the preliminary exploration of AniBalloons, a novel form of chat balloon animations aimed at enriching nonverbal affective expression in text-based communications. AniBalloons were designed using extracted motion patterns from affective animations and mapped to six commonly communicated emotions. An evaluation study with 40 participants assessed their effectiveness in conveying intended emotions and their perceived emotional properties. The results showed that 80% of the animations effectively conveyed the intended emotions. AniBalloons covered a broad range of emotional parameters, comparable to frequently used emojis, offering potential for a wide array of affective expressions in daily communication. The findings suggest AniBalloons' promise for enhancing emotional expressiveness in text-based communication and provide early insights for future affective design.