@inproceedings{10.1145/3772318.3791488,
author = {Zhang, Yusen and Ho, Edmond S. L. and Ding, Xianghua(Sharon)},
title = {EmotiV: Exploring Automatic Emotion Sharing through Facial Expression Recognition (FER) for Online Co-Watching},
year = {2026},
isbn = {9798400722783},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791488},
doi = {10.1145/3772318.3791488},
abstract = {Online video watching has become prevalent, so are technologies to promote a sense of co-watching across distances. However, most co-watching technologies require active input from users (e.g. through text-based interactions) or rely on special devices. This paper presents EmotiV, a prototype designed to bring the co-watching experience to users without additional effort or devices, by automatically capturing and sharing viewers’ emotions through Facial Expression Recognition (FER). A user study with 20 participants using a comedy movie-watching scenario shows that EmotiV helped bring a sense of togetherness, aliveness and fun, and was appreciated to be more timely and authentic although with less control in comparison to traditional text-based interaction. Meanwhile, it also helped promote self-awareness and reflections, with privacy concerns to be addressed. These findings suggest that FER can serve as a lightweight and non-intrusive mechanism for augmenting remote co-watching, offering design insights for affect-aware computing to support everyday media consumption.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
articleno = {1000},
numpages = {14},
keywords = {Affective Computing, Co-watching, Facial Expression Recognition, Emotion Sharing},
location = {
},
series = {CHI '26}
}