Relation between kawaii feeling and biological signals

In the advanced information society of the 21^st century with its communication infrastructure of computers and networks, it is crucial to enhance sollware that utilizes these technologies, that is, digital content. Among such content, various Japanese kawaii characters such as Hello Kitty and Pokemon have become popular all over the world, suggesting that the allure of Japanese cuteness can be attained worldwide. However, since few studies have focused on the kawaii attributes of the interfaces of interactive systems or other artificial products, we focus on a systematic analysis ofkawaii interfaces themselves: kawaii caused by the attributes of such interfaces as shapes, colors, textures, and materials. Our aim is to clarify a method for constructing a kawaii interface from the research results. Kawaii is one of the important kansei values for future interactive systems and industrial products. We previously performed experiments and obtained valuable knowledge on such kawaii attributes as kawaii shapes and kawaii colors. llowever, only questionnaire was employed for the evaluation of kawaii feeling in those experiments. Although questionnaires are the most common form of kansei evaluation, they suffer from some demerits such as linguistic ambiguity, possibility of mixing intension of experimenters and/or participants to the results, and interruption of system's stream of information input/output. Thus, to compensate for these questionnaire demerits, we examined the possibility of using biological signals. This paper describes a trial to detect comfortable feeling and/or excitement caused by seeing kawaii objects by changes in biological signals..