Laughter Blossom: A Prototype of Laughter Interaction Design

In this paper, we propose and evaluate a design prototype, called Laughter Blossom, which interacts through laughter. It is an artificial plant whose blossom recognizes and acts upon laughter. Laughing positively impacts the human mind and body since people become happier as they laugh. To detect a smiling face as an indicator of laughter, facial expression recognition technology has
already been popular in HCI. It is broadly applied in areas such as service design, product design or media art. However, laughter itself has not been researched sufficiently. We conducted an ideation workshop for laughter interaction design, by distinguishing our approach from that of smile recognition. Based on the findings of the workshop, we developed the idea of a design prototype. Through user studies that focused on group and individual use situations, we identified four issues for the future development of Laughter Blossom including (1) simultaneous responses with the user, (2) recording laughter, (3) interruption of the moment, and (4) sympathy with the user.