The television remains a central hub in the home environment. We believe that in order to maintain its central role future TV's will need to incorporate empathic features. These will be delivered by interacting with other personal devices in home and services in the cloud. This position paper illustrates the common as well as the individual views of several Belgian partners working around a common scenario in the ITEA2 'Empathic Products' project.

Feedback and affordances are two of the most well-known principles in interaction design. Unfortunately, the related and equally important notion of feedforward has not been given as much consideration. Nevertheless, feedforward is a powerful design principle for bridging Norman's Gulf of Execution. We reframe feedforward by disambiguating it from related design principles such as feedback and perceived affordances, and identify new classes of feedforward. In addition, we present a reference framework that provides a means for designers to explore and recognize different opportunities for feedforward.

In todays videogames user feedback is often provided through raw statistics and scoreboards. We envision that incorporating empathic feedback matching the player's current mood will improve the overall gaming experience. In this paper we present Bro-cam, a novel system that provides empathic feedback to the player based on their body postures. Different body postures of the players are used as an indicator for their openness. From their level of openness, Bro-cam profiles the players into different personality types ranging from introvert to extrovert. Empathic feedback is then automatically generated and matched to their preferences for certain humoristic feedback statements. We use a depth camera to track the player's body postures and movements during the game and analyze these to provide customized feedback. We conducted a user study involving 32 players to investigate their subjective assessment on the empathic game feedback. Semi-structured interviews reveal that participants were positive about the empathic feedback and Bro-cam significantly improves their game experience.

In contrast with design flaws that occur in user interfaces, design flaws in physical spaces have a much higher cost and impact. Software is in fact fairly easy to change and update in contrast with legacy physical constructions where updating their physical appearance is often not an option. We present the Feedforward Torch, a mobile projection system that targets the augmentation of legacy hardware with feedforward information. Feedforward explains users what the results of their action will be, and can thus be seen as the opposite of feedback. A first user study suggests that providing feedforward in these environments could improve their usability.