Poke: Emotional touch delivery through an inflatable surface over interpersonal mobile communications

Abstract

In this paper we present Poke - a soft and human-like remote touch technique through an inflatable surface. We aimed to design it for delivering more emotional and pleasant touches over interpersonal mobile communications. Poke enables to touch human's skin with an inflatable surface according to the other user's finger pressures and hand gestures during a phone call. It delivers different kinds of pokes and other affective touches with its inflating patterns (strengths and repetitions) and vibrations from the top of the inflatable surface. The paper also suggests affective touches such as weak/hard poke, poke and then shake, poke back and pat which can be exchanged during typical phone calls.