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，这给人们的生活带来了不幸的后果。触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。虚拟环境忽略或削弱了用户抓取和移动物体的能力，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，随着时间的推移，通信（例如，打电话给家人登记）缺乏社交接触和共同存在感，导致焦虑和抑郁。可编程触摸技术的进步，被称为触觉技术，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。触觉设计的主要问题仍然是：“我如何通过触摸向用户传达想要的含义？”设计出能够在用户脑海中唤起相关含义，并且易于区分的振动信号是非常困难的。目前，创建这样的信号依赖于对工程参数的反复试验和广泛的用户测试。这种低效的过程阻碍了领域专家设计师（汽车制造商、可访问性专家、教育工作者、治疗师等）在他们的应用程序中加入触觉。为了解决这个使用触觉的障碍，这个项目将通过研究人类如何解释和区分振动信号来实现振动设计的民主化。具体来说，该项目将开发模型来预测人们如何(1)用自然语言描述信号的含义，以及(2)感知信号的相似性。接下来，研究者和她的团队将(3)建立触觉创作工具，将这些模型与设计师的输入交织在一起，以帮助快速收敛于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造性愿景的影响。该项目将专注于三种振动触觉技术，这些技术以我们手中的受体为目标，提供最广泛的接触和非接触振动触觉反馈：机械振动致动器、表面电振动装置和半空中超声触觉。与以前的研究依赖于带有几个控制参数的信号相比，这项研究将模拟人类对人类设计师创造的复杂信号的处理。这项研究的结果将开创一类新的感觉语言模型的发展，揭示人类振动触觉感知和语言在三种技术中的普遍趋势，并确定触觉工具和住院医师计划的具体机会，以促进跨学科触觉设计团队的学习和合作。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.