Emolleia – Wearable Kinetic Flower Display for Expressing Emotions

What we wear (our clothes and wearable accessories) can represent our mood at the moment. We developed Emolleia to explore how to make aesthetic wears more expressive to become a novel form of non-verbal communication to express our emotional feelings. Emolleia is an open wearable kinetic display in form of three 3D printed flowers that can dynamically open and close at different speeds. With our open-source platform, users can define their own animated motions. In this paper, we described the prototype design, hardware considerations, and user surveys (n=50) to evaluate the expressiveness of 8 pre-defined animated motions of Emolleia. Our initial results showed animated motions are feasible to communicate different emotional feelings especially at the valence and arousal dimensions. Based on the findings, we mapped eight pre-defined animated motions to the reported, user-perceived valence, arousal and dominance and discussed possible directions for future work. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3490149.3505581