Using Thermal Stimuli to Enhance Photo-Sharing in Social Media

Limited work has been undertaken to show how the emotive ability of thermal stimuli can be used for interaction purposes. One potential application area is using thermal stimuli to influence emotions in images shared online such as social media platforms. This paper presents a two-part study, which examines how the documented emotive property of thermal stimuli can be applied to enhance social media images. Participants in part-one supplied images from their personal collection or social media profiles, and were asked to augment each image with thermal stimuli based on the emotions they wanted to enhance or reduce. Part-one participants were interviewed to understand the effects they wanted augmented images to have. In part-two, these augmented images were perceived by a different set of participants in a simulated social media interface. Results showed strong agreement between the emotions augmented images were designed to evoke and the emotions they actually evoked as perceived by part-two participants. Participants in part-one selected thermal stimuli augmentation intended to modulate valence and arousal in images as a way of enhancing the realism of the images augmented. Part-two results indicate this was achieved as participants perceived thermal stimuli augmentation reduced valence in negative images and modulated valence and arousal in positive images.