CAREER:HCC:Democratizing Haptics: Enabling Novice Designers with Vibrotactile Models and Tools

今天的技术只包括最小的触摸反馈，这对人们的生活产生了不幸的后果。触摸屏手机和汽车仪表盘需要视觉上的关注，这将人们的安全置于危险之中。虚拟环境忽视或削弱了用户抓取和移动对象的能力，影响了灵活性。新兴的沉浸式教育和工作培训机会在很大程度上排除了盲人和低视力用户。最后，电信（例如，打电话给家人办理登机手续）缺乏社交接触和共同存在的感觉，随着时间的推移会导致焦虑和抑郁。可编程触摸技术（即触觉技术）的进步可以提供一个没有这些挑战的未来，但经验丰富的触觉设计师很少，成为触觉专家需要多年的实践。触觉设计中的主要问题仍然是：“我如何通过触摸向用户传达期望的含义？“设计振动信号是非常困难的，它可以在用户的脑海中唤起相关的含义，并且很容易彼此区分。目前，创建这样的信号依赖于对工程参数的试错探索和广泛的用户测试。这种低效的过程阻碍了领域专家设计师（汽车制造商，无障碍专家，教育家，治疗师等）在他们的应用程序中包括触觉。为了解决使用触觉的这一障碍，该项目将通过研究人类如何解释和区分振动信号来使振动设计民主化。具体来说，该项目将开发预测人们如何（1）用自然语言描述信号的含义和（2）感知信号相似性的模型。接下来，研究人员和她的团队将（3）构建触觉创作工具，将这些模型与设计师的输入交织在一起，以帮助快速收敛到应用程序的合理触觉信号。然后，调查小组将研究这些工具对设计师实现其创意愿景的影响。该项目将重点关注三种振动触觉技术，这些技术针对我们手中的受体，并提供最广泛的接触和非接触式振动触觉反馈：机械振动致动器，表面电振动设备和空中超声触觉。与以前依赖于具有少数受控参数的信号的研究相比，这项研究将模拟人类设计师创建的复杂信号的人类处理过程。这项研究的成果将开创一类新的感官语言模型的发展，揭示人类振动触觉感知和语言在三种技术中的普遍趋势，并确定触觉工具和驻留计划的具体机会，以支持跨学科触觉设计团队的学习和合作。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的学术价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

Today's technology includes only minimal touch feedback, which has unfortunate consequences on people's lives. Touchscreen phones and car dashboards demand visual attention, putting people's safety at risk. Virtual environments neglect or diminish users' abilities to grasp and move objects, impacting dexterity. The emerging immersive education and work training opportunities largely exclude blind and low-vision users. Finally, the fact that telecommunication (for example, calling family to check in) lacks social touch and a sense of co-presence leads to anxiety and depression over time. Advances in programmable touch technology, known as haptic technology, can offer a future free of these challenges, but experienced haptic designers are few, and becoming an expert in haptics takes years of practice. The main question in haptic design remains: "How can I convey the desired meaning to users through touch?" It is surprisingly difficult to design vibration signals that can evoke relevant meanings in users' minds and are easy to distinguish from one another. Currently, creating such signals relies on trial-and-error exploration of engineering parameters and extensive user testing. This inefficient process discourages domain-expert designers (car manufacturers, accessibility experts, educators, therapists, and the like) from including haptics in their applications. To address this barrier to using haptics, this project will democratize vibration design by investigating how humans interpret and distinguish vibration signals. Specifically, the project will develop models that predict how people (1) describe a signal's meaning with natural language and (2) perceive the similarity of signals. Next, the investigator and her team will (3) build haptic authoring tools that interleave these models with designer input to help quickly converge on plausible haptic signals for an application. The investigator team will then study the tools' impact on enabling designers to achieve their creative visions. This project will focus on three vibrotactile technologies that target receptors in our hands and offer the widest range of contact and contactless vibrotactile feedback: mechanical vibration actuators, surface electrovibration devices, and mid-air ultrasound haptics. In contrast to previous studies that rely on signals with a few controlled parameters, this research will model the human processing of complex signals created by human designers. The outcomes of this research will pioneer the development of a new class of sensory language models, reveal generalizable trends in human vibrotactile perception and language across three technologies, and identify specific opportunities for haptic tools and residency programs to scaffold learning and collaboration for interdisciplinary haptic design teams.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.