Haptic Computing: Abstracting Interactive Touch Feedback

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For thirty years, researchers have demonstrated haptic technology's immense potential to improve our lives. By engaging users with physical feedback like force and tactile cues, haptics enriches interactive systems with the sense of touch: virtual worlds become more realistic, information more accessible. Major companies and startups alike are bringing haptics to end-users, driving haptic technology towards ubiquitous deployment.******Haptics researchers are now victims of their own success. Research has yielded a stunning variety of devices and feedback techniques. Unlike visual and audio feedback, haptic feedback varies with the sense (e.g., tactile senses like pressure and temperature, kinesthetic senses like force), the interaction paradigm (e.g., passively felt, actively explored), and a multitude of physical technologies (e.g., mechanical actuation, electrical effects, perceptual illusions). Researchers now repeatedly solve the same problems: we are unable to share or adapt the haptic content we create because it is designed for specialized hardware and does not translate to other contexts.******In the proposed research program, I aim to abstract haptic content definition across the diverse modalities of haptic feedback. Specifically, my team and I will develop a software platform to share haptic content across different contexts, with three objectives:******1. Build an online system (the “Haptiverse”) for scalable creation and sharing of heterogenous haptic content. My team and I will populate it with a large (1000+) dataset of haptic content using procedural generation techniques. Once constructed, we will design intelligent recommender systems and search techniques so that researchers can find content.******2. Create higher-level specifications of haptic content across different hardware contexts. Haptic feedback is highly dependent on the physical setup and user context, and researchers must adapt or recreate content for their specific context. We aim to generalize specifications of haptic content so that it can automatically “compile” to different hardware contexts.******3. Use the developed platform to conduct original research into haptic systems. My team and I will iteratively design and build haptic systems that drive content creation and provide example hardware contexts. The developed platform can be iteratively tested with each system. Currently, I plan to target two example areas: haptic feedback in fully-autonomous vehicles, and the use of haptic feedback by therapists and end-users for mental wellness.******By developing a software platform for sharing content across hardware contexts, my team and I will accelerate research for haptic technology, even as the technology continues to advance and diversify.