What Makes Motion Meaningful? Affective Properties of Abstract Motion

Motion provides a rich modality for communicating emotion and creating affect, and developing techniques for analyzing, manipulating and enhancing animations in video and computer graphics is an active research area. However, we have little empirical evidence of how particular attributes of motion elicit particular impressions. In this paper we describe a study of how perceptual attributes of abstract motion contribute to affective interpretation. Our results show that even small simple motions can reliably evoke certain impressions given particular motion attributes. These results contribute to our understanding of computational aesthetics and have implications for the design of media experiences, visualization, interactive art and immersive environments. They also provide insight into what properties of motion might prove most evocative in video and animation textures.