The Affective Affordance of Motionscape

Visual artists and designers often employ the extensive compositions of visual forms and motion to construct abstract motionscapes. While abstract motionscapes are often employed for the evocation of affective experience in many recent interactive environments, little work has been done to correlate the two. In this thesis research, two empirical studies were conducted to investigate how various fundamental properties of motionscapes influence viewer affective experience. Sixty university students were recruited to give self-reports on the affective experience of a number of motionscape primitives. Results showed that basic motionscape properties such as speed, direction, path curvature, shape, and scale, all had significant impacts on the affective experience of the tested motionscape primitives. The display conditions under which motionscape primitives were presented, were also found crucial for the motionscape expressiveness. Based on these findings, we envision the emerging principles and directions of the motionscape design for affective visualization within the interactive environments.