Evaluations of gestural animations to convey feelings in asynchronous network communication

This paper deals with nonverbal communication in asynchronous networks. It is well known that nonverbal communication plays an important role in interpersonal communication. However, nonverbal communication has not been used in traditional character based network communication until now, yet the need for conveying feelings has been raised. And due to the development of multimedia network, it has been thought that nonverbal communication can be valuable for network communication. This research is based on the importance of the expressing feelings through nonverbal communication, especially gestures. Actually it has not yet been determined what kind of feelings can be conveyed by gestures. Thus the evaluation of feelings expressed by gestures has been done using animated cartoons. From this, it has been shown that feelings expressed by gestures on display are distinguished from five ways by Japanese. Furthermore, another evaluation of an electronic mail with the CG animation has been done as an example of asynchronous network communication. From this, it has been seen that mails with the gestural animation reflect the feelings of its animation. So using gestural animations to convey feelings in asynchronous network has been suggested.