Cheiro : creating expressive textual communication and anthropomorphic typography

Abstract

Despite rapid technological advancement and improvement in network bandwidth, people still like to use text for remote communication. Simplicity, directness and anonymity make textual chat the most popular method of communication in the technology-mediated world. In face-to-face communication, people can use gestures, facial expressions, eye gaze and other body languages to alter, emphasize or strengthen their spoken words. Unfortunately, current textual platforms do not have a proper channel for these cues and signals. These non-linguistic cues are able to convey social and emotional information accompanied by the spoken words. I argue that a well-designed textual communication system can increase the expressiveness of text-based chat environments, and we need to have a better chat interface to improve our social interactions in the digital world. Cheiro is an exploration of user-centered gesture-based interfaces that enable expressive textual communication.

(cont.) My approach is to use common input devices, such as mouse or keyboard, as the gestural interface to amplify or change the tone and meaning of the text, and send non-linguistic signals using graphical elements and anthropomorphized kinetic typography. The goal of this thesis is to find an intuitive mapping between the user's gestural input and the graphically enhanced text output, which constructs a novel expressive textual communication platform.