For non-sport fans, perceiving the excitement of surrounding fan groups and the arousal of collective emotions are some of the crucial factors that motivate their engaged excitement and loyalty in a sport; these factors are closely related to the process of evolution from a non-fan to a fan. The global COVID-19 pandemic changed the way of sport-watching from watching at the arena to watching from home alone. This has highlighted significant difficulties in the excitement transmission and arousal channel between non-sport fans and fans. Previous remote emotional intervening mediums had been limited to the use of virtual avatars to convey partners’ external cues (such as appearance), to enhance the sense of presence from visual-audio perspectives. In this study, we explored a novel remote emotional intervening medium that conveys sport-fans’ internal cues (bio-signals) that are widely believed to be related to internal emotional states of human, and displays those signals in a way that gives non-sport fans a deeper and more immersive experience: haptic feedback (FB) experience. Three bio-signal-based haptic FB prototypes were developed, including heart-rate-based vibration, electromyography (EMG)-based pressure, and skin-temperature-based thermal FBs. An exploratory pilot study was conducted on a group of non-sport fans in a lab-control environment of remote-sport-watching to explore the effectiveness of the proposed mediums in enhancing their perception of sport-fan’s excitement (emotion perception). Besides, we also analyzed non-sport fans’ heart rate data when they were participants in the experiments to measure the performance of the proposed mediums in evoking the engaged excitement of non-sport fans (emotion arousal). Our results indicate the outstanding ability of EMG-based pressure FB in effectively enhancing the process of emotion perception and the notable advantage of heart-rate-based vibration FB in the arousal of non-sport fans’ engaged excitement. This study presents the potential utility of bio-signal-based haptic feedback in augmenting remote emotional perception and arousal and also provides the underlining support for the future exploration and development directions for social computing based on bio-signals and haptic technologies.
