Physical user interfaces communication of information and affect

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Touch is crucial to communication in the real world. In contrast, our exchanges with everyday modern technology are haptically impoverished; we are insulated to an extent that physicality has come to feel unnatural, with practical and aesthetic consequences. In a related evolution, the spread of complex and pervasive human-machine systems into areas like automobile cockpits and handheld devices has made information overload and the constant interruptions a way of life.       Using psychophysically grounded design to embed haptics in the world is a path both to restoring what has been lost in the computerization of daily life, and to a new generation of interfaces designed with the goal of respecting and preserving that increasingly precious resource, human attention. The unifying goal of my research program is thus to consider haptic feedback in the broader context of communication, humans to machines or to other humans mediated by a machine. The proposed research has three parts:      1) Methodology for Perceptual Design of Haptic Icons.  My group's past and ongoing psychophysics experimentation has centered on revealing the foundation that will support the design of a new, abstract haptic iconography. We will use this data to develop a new procedural experimental/analytical technique to efficiently generate distinguishable and meaningful sets of haptic icons.      2) Haptic Guidance for Shared Control of Systems. Building on our recently gained knowledge in techniques for haptic guidance in driving-like contexts, we will continue to develop and explore possibilities and mechanisms for haptically-mediated, user/system control sharing in a new testbed environment based on musical instrument control.      3) Bidirectional Haptic Communication of Affect. We will use recently completed test environments and initial results to experimentally establish essential attributes of different communication modalities.