Touching Emoji(表情符号)
Distancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic has made both physical and social connections a touch more difficult to maintain. For Stanford University graduate student Millie Salvato, being apart from her mother on the opposite coast has proved challenging.
After collecting 661 touch movements-squeezes, strokes, shakes, pokes, and the like-Salvato and her colleagues mapped the location and pressure of each.
“It doesn’t feel like an actual human hand ... but it doesn’t feel like these separate motions either,” Salvato says, as one might expect from large moving disks. “It feels nice, honestly.”
In the new study, “I think it’s interesting that participants can reliably understand what touch has been delivered to them at a pretty high rate, given the scarce amount of information that they have available to them,” Gerling says.
Previous research has found that social touch is important for physical and mental health.
| A．One can’t help but wonder when new tech will convey emotion through a virtual touch. |
| B．Even with no training, 30 new study participants correctly matched the simulated touches to the six situations 45 percent of the time. |
| C．Sometimes a text or video call is not enough, and people in Salvato’s situation often long for a way to send a loving touch or comforting squeeze from afar. |
| D．In the future, instead of just sending a <3 to a loved one by phone or computer, adding a “touch emoji” might help us feel just a little bit closer. |
| E．Next, they used a machine-learning software to select the movements that were most reliably part of each response. |
| F．“It’s a unique work that looks at how our social touch is delivered and then... how to reproduce it,” says Gerling, a touch researcher not involved in the study. |
