Visualizing Excitement of Individuals and Groups

Excitement or arousal is one of the main emotional dimensions that affects our lives on a daily basis. We win a tennis match, watch a great movie, get into an argument with a colleague—all of these are instances when most of us experience excitement, yet we do not pay much attention to it. Today, there are few systems that capture our excitement levels and even fewer that actually promote awareness of our most exciting moments. In this paper, we propose a visualization concept for representing individual and group-level excitement for emotional self-awareness and group-level awareness. The data used for the visualization is obtained from smart wristbands worn by each of the users. The visualization uses animated glyphs to generate a real-time representation for each individual’s excitement levels. We introduce two types of encodings for these glyphs: one focusing on capturing both the current excitement and the excitement history, as well as another focusing only on real-time values and previous peaks. The excitement levels are computed based on measurements of the user’s galvanic skin response and accelerometer data from the wristbands, allowing for a classification of the excitement levels into experienced (excitement without physical manifestation) and manifested excitement. A dynamic clustering of the individual glyphs supports the scalability of our visualization, while at the same time offering an overview of the group-level excitement and its distribution. The results of a preliminary evaluation suggest that the visualization allows users to intuitively and accurately perceive both individual and group-level excitement. EmoVis 2016 Workshop, March 10, 2016, Sonoma, CA, USA. Workshop proceedings published by Linköping University Electronic Press. Copyright c © 2016 for this paper by its authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. Author