GesFabri: Exploring Affordances and Experience of Textile Interfaces for Gesture-based Interaction

Textile interfaces are of interest to ubiquitous computing as they are easy to carry and manipulate. However, interesting questions remain about what type of natural gestures people make when interacting with textile interfaces and their emotional response to this interaction. We introduce GesFabri, a set of five interactive textile interfaces with distinct textures, created to investigate the intuitive interaction gestures and accompanied the emotional experience. This research sought to (1) design textile interfaces with intuitive gesture affordance, (2) explore the emotional effects of the developed gesture-based interfaces under four feedback modes (touch-only, visual feedback, audio feedback, multisensory feedback). The experimental results verify our hypotheses that (1) textile texture could provide natural gesture affordances; (2) the GesFabri interfaces' feedback mode was the main factor in the differences of emotional valence, arousal, GSR; and (3) both gesture-based interaction on textiles and the feedback mode had an impact on user emotions. These results highlight the gesture affordances of the e-textile interfaces and contribute to a better understanding of the user experience when interacting with gesture-based textile interfaces.