Toward Enhancing User Involvement via Empathy Channel in Human-Computer Interface Design

This paper reports our research toward enhancing the 'User Involvement' in human-computer interaction, which is introduced to grasp the idealised state in which a natural communication between a computer and its user should be established. Moreover, we also introduce a new idea of 'Empathy Channel', through which humans can interact with virtual agents and objects on computers with more sense of reality. The main issue of this paper is to clarify various methods for establishing an Empathy Channel in building a human-computer interface. We believe a good design of human-computer interface with an Empathy Channel is one of the best methods to enhance the User Involvement.