Kansei Engineering

Kansei engineering is engineering a product or environment to play on the end-user's emotions, to capture the senses and provoke strong emotional reactions. The word Kansei is Japanese, which is a word with multiple meanings but all revolving round emotional response to sensory input.

Kansei engineer Simon Schütte coined a meaning of Kansei in 2005 which is the one broadly used for virtual environments and augmented environments alike. This variation holds that Kansei is defined as the individual subjective impression from an object, situation or environment, using the full range of senses available to them.

It applies to VR and AR more so than other types of product specifically because both revolve around suborning the end-user's senses directly, and so can offer a much more direct sensory experience, which in turn can be used to trigger a powerful emotional response.

Well engineered Kansei ensures that the emotional response triggered is the one intended by the environment or encounter designer, and such a response is a very powerful tool for pulling the user into the environment and making them feel emotionally invested in what occurs. Particularly useful for story-driven environments, kansei engineering has a major place in gameworlds and educational environments alike.

Even something as simple as tying scents to encounters in a virtual environment used for training, is a type of kansei engineering, since scent has the quickest path to a user's associative memory systems, and as such can trigger a powerful emotional reaction.

In essence, if you are trying to elicit a particular emotional response from the end-user of your environment, Kansei engineering is the discipline you require, and will tell you how best to do so.

See Also: Kansei, Immersion , Synthetic Reality, Sensory Reference Frame, Sensory Substitution Device, Feedback Channel, Soundscape, First Person Perspective, Alternate Life

Below, we offer a selection of links from our resource databases which may match this term.

Kansei Kansei Engineering

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