Experimental Study about Effect of Thermal Information Presentation to Mouse

Despite the many types of telecommunication systems that have been developed, it can still be hard to convey various types of information expressively to a remote partner. Our research focuses on the use of variations in temperature to represent information expressively. We developed a mouse device with thermal capabilities; the device becomes warmer or colder to a user's palm when the user clicks "thermal" photographic images on a computer screen. Each image has an associated thermal value. In this paper, we report the results of an evaluation of the thermal performance of the device. We also report results from a preliminary experiment that determine how the thermal expression affects a user's impression of images.