Expression of emotions through haptic interaction in virtual environment

The aim of this study is to examine how five universal emotions are expressed in virtual environment through a haptic device. Participants were asked to transmit five universal emotions to 3D male and female model projected on a wall by means of a haptic device. In other words, the study has two independent variables: the gender of the model and the emotions to be expressed. The design of the study is 2x5 within subect design. Research to date has not yet revealed the reasons why touch is so impressive on humans, and little is known about the cognitive, neural and physiological mechanisms underlying these behavioral phenomena. For this reason, this study which is expected to contribute to parameterization in terms of dependent variables, touch force (intensity), touch speed and touch time, is aimed to be integrated into humanoid robots. It is also an example of human-machine interaction in the virtual environment. The difference of this study from other studies is that the human model is simulated in a virtual environment through the program written in C++ and the emotions are transmitted by means of a multi-directional (six degrees of freedom) haptic device.The results obtained from the emotion transmission study showed that there are differences in the derived parameters when expressing different emotions and these variances can be measured in meaningful ways. The results showed that anger emotion, which is an active emotion, can be defined as long, fast and high in force intensity, while the feeling of sadness, which is a passive emotion, can be defined as short, slow and low in force intensity. In addition, it was observed that the model gender variable factor was significantly different in terms of mean touch time and average touch speed, but it was not significantly different in terms of mean touch force intensity.