There`ve been many researches about color association, emphasizing color emotion. Color emotion itself implies the multi-modal sensation, so-called synesthesia. Feelings of taste, sound, scent, touching can be more deeply expressed through color. When seeing the surface of an object, we perceive not only color but also texture. It means that we can feel the tactile sense though visual perception without touching, which is represented by color. We name it as ‘visual tactility’ in this study.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between visual tactility and color emotion. Visual tactility represents the feelings of roughness, hardness, glossiness, temperature, weight, and etc. If a certain color applies on the gray-level texture, it influences tactile feeling more roughly or smoothly. This study tries to find out the interesting change or tendency in visual tactility according to the color. In comparison of gray-level texture and color texture, we assume that color becomes an influential factor for changing a person’s emotion on visual tactility.
In order to explore this assumption, a Web-based Assessment Tool is developed on the windows sever system using asp, html and etc. This program is designed to score the visual tactility explained by five paired adjectives about given samples on the monitor display according to the color change of four hues (red, yellow, green, blue) and 4 tones (vivid, pale, grayish, dark). This interactive program simulates the change of visual tactility under the effect of color. As this program is developed with web-safe digital color palettes, it has a potential to be applied into multi-cultural and global color studies in the future.
Through several experiments with the Web-based Assessment Tool, we have distinct results about color emotion related to visual tactility. In roughness, yellow-green with grayish tone increases the roughness while red with vivid tone augment the smoothness. In hardness, blue with grayish-dark tone makes surface look more hard and heavy. In Glossiness, green with grayish-dark tone makes it look more matt, while red and vivid tone makes glossier. Finally, for temperature, red-yellow represents warmness while green-blue represent coolness.
This study suggests the new approach of studying color emotion study with visual tactility. It also provides a new studying environment with digital color palette. The final result of this study shows the importance of exploring color emotion studies based on the interactive features among multi-modal sensation.
