Vibrotactile Rendering of Human Emotions on the Manifold of Facial Expressions

Facial expressions play an important role in every day social interaction. To enhance the daily life experience for the visually impaired, we present the Facial Expression Appearance vibroTactile System (FEATS), which uses a vibrotactile chair as the social interface for the visually impaired. An array of vibrating motors are mounted spatially on the back of an office chair. The Locally Linear Embedding (LLE) algorithm is extended to compute the manifold of facial expressions, which is used to control vibration of motors to render emotions. Thus, the chair could provide the visually impaired with on-line dynamic emotion information about the person he/she is communicating with. Usability evaluation of the system is carried out. The results are encouraging and demonstrate usability for the visually impaired. The user studies show that perfect recognition accuracy of emotion type is achieved by the FEATS.