Imaginary social touch

https://github.com/shaunabanana/social-touch

Intro

This is a very small study on virtual social touch and copresence.

Using visual and auditory channels to simulate social touch sensations that enhance the sense of virtual social copresence is a question that has just been initially explored.

In this project, I designed and implemented a socializing experience delivered only through screen-mediated virtual touch. Further experiments with 12 people explored the effects of anonymity, the presence/lacking of a user avatar, and visual augmentation of co-touching on their sense of copresence.

Next steps

None for now. But the code might be useful in the future.