Purr-ogrammed Love: A Narrative Review of Virtual Pets

In the ‘90s Tamagotchi (Tamagotchi, 1996) and virtual pets were cultural touchstones of the personal computer and handheld game console revolutions. Despite continued popularity, virtual pets remain under-researched. A narrative review was conducted to identify key themes in the literature surrounding virtual pets. 45 articles were included. Reflexive thematic analysis identified six major themes: life and death, health and habits, capitalism and consumption, gender, toys and play, and ethics. Virtual pets serve purposes beyond entertainment, including managing physical and emotional well-being and aiding in learning. Virtual pet gameplay is also seen to challenge normative notions of productivity and purpose. This review brings together decades of academic interest in virtual pets across disciplines to better understand their enduring cultural significance

Embracing first-person perspectives in soma-based design

A set of prominent designers embarked on a research journey to explore aesthetics in movement-based design. Here we unpack one of the design sensitivities unique to our practice: A strong first person perspective-where the movements, somatics and aesthetic sensibilities of the designer, design researcher and user are at the forefront. We present an annotated portfolio of design exemplars and a brief introduction to some of the design methods and theory we use, together substantiating and explaining the first-person perspective. At the same time, we show how this felt dimension, despite its subjective nature, is what provides rigor and structure to our design research. Our aim is to assist researchers in soma-based design and designers wanting to consider the multiple facets when designing for the aesthetics of movement. The applications span a large field of designs, including slow introspective, contemplative interactions, arts, dance, health applications, games, work applications and many others

Affective interaction and affective computing-past, present and future

HCI researchers recognize affect and emotion as fundamental parts of human experience however conceptualizing emotions as ineffable, embodied, situated, or culturally bound does not fit within some of the dominant paradigm of Affective computing and emotion AI research focused mostly on recognition and classification of basic emotions. An alternative term, Affective Interaction, has emerged to bring together a growing body of research which treats emotion and affect within HCI in similar ways. This workshop brings the research community together to examine various perspectives on affect, and specifically contrast Affective Interaction with Affective Computing. The aim is to discuss opportunities and limitations associated with each perspective, reconcile with advances in the science of emotion, and to speculate on future research directions. We believe that bringing together HCI researchers around Affective Interaction is vitally important because the broad reach of Affective Computing techniques may be obscuring advances in emotion research that show evidence that emotion defies easy categories and is culturally situated

Emotional Responses to Health Data Visualization

International audienc