Affective Evaluation for Material Perception of Bead-Coated Resin Surfaces Using Visual and Tactile Sensations—Focusing on Kawaii

We performed affective evaluation experiments on both visual and tactile material perception of bead-coated resin surfaces in which the materials, the diameters, and the hardness of beads were expanded systematically. First, we performed an experiment on the similarity of the bead-coated resin surfaces to reduce number of material samples. Second, another experiment was performed on the similarity of the evaluation items to reduce their number. Third, we performed an affective evaluation experiment on selected samples with students and middle-aged participants to clarify the differences among the different physical attributes of resin surfaces and focused on kawaii. Then, we added hues, which is one of the three elements of color, and performed two preliminary experiments to select appropriate adjective pairs for affective evaluation of the effect of hues and to select the hue candidates. With 21 adjective pairs (e.g., masculine–feminine and relaxed–anxious), and seven hues (e.g., yellow-red and blue-purple), we clarified the combined effect of the tactile sensation and the hues on the affective evaluations using combinations of actual bead-coated resin and 3D models. Our analysis results suggest that hue, bead diameter, and gender are important for affective evaluation.