Overview
Emothesia interprets and maps biosignals from yourself or someone else onto your vision and hearing. An AR system (Magic Leap 2) handles visual-audio mapping and a dashboard display of heart rate, temperature, and electrodermal activity (OpenBCI Emotibit and Apple Watch).
By letting you listen to someone else’s body, the system aims to enhance interpersonal awareness of emotional states and triggers. By giving you an interoceptive sense of your own biosignals, it aims to enhance individual emotional awareness.
System
Two prototypes. The visual-audio system pairs an explicit dashboard — animated icons driven by heart rate, temperature, and EDA — with implicit feedback: the whole world dims and a heartbeat plays on each of your heart beats. Signals are processed in TouchDesigner with peak recognition on raw PPG, and sent over OSC to the headset.
The haptic intervention runs on the Apple Watch: a heart-rate sensing module plus an adjustable vibrational beat that simulates a heartbeat — usable for hacking your own physiology, or for synchronizing with another person.
Findings
Implicit feedback beat explicit: world-dimming on each heartbeat created a stronger sense of embodied connection than the icon dashboard — immersion through diminishment. We recommend hybrid systems integrating both.
Headsets remain a barrier to the very connection they augment — obscuring the eyes interferes with the microexpressions interpersonal communication depends on. And biosignal interpretation raises philosophical problems: classifying emotion into discrete categories is imperfect and culturally contingent, while our emotional experience is fundamentally continuous.