EnviroPulse
Deltcho Valtchanov, Mark Hancock · 2015
Interacting with nature is beneficial to a person's mental-state, but it can sometimes be difficult to find environments that will induce positive affect (e.g., when planning a run). In this paper, we describe EnviroPulse-a system for auto-matically determining and communicating the expected affective valence (EAV) of environments to individuals. We describe a prototype that allows this to be used in real-time on a smartphone, but EnviroPulse could easily be incorporated into GPS systems, mapping services, or image-based systems. Our work differs from existing work in af-fective computing in that, rather than detecting a user's affect directly, we automatically determine the EAV of the environment through visual analysis. We present results that suggest our system can determine the EAV of envi-ronments. We also introduce real-time affective visual feedback of the calculated EAV of the images, and present results from an informal study suggesting that real-time visual feedback can be used for induction of affect.