Haptic Computing: Abstracting Interactive Touch Feedback

三十年来，研究人员已经证明了触觉技术改善我们生活的巨大潜力。通过向用户提供力和触觉提示等物理反馈，触觉技术为互动系统增添了触觉：虚拟世界变得更加逼真，信息更容易获取。大公司和初创公司都在为最终用户带来触觉，推动触觉技术走向无处不在的部署。触觉研究人员现在成了自己成功的牺牲品。研究已经产生了令人惊叹的各种设备和反馈技术。与视觉和听觉反馈不同，触觉反馈随着感觉(例如，压力和温度之类的触觉感觉，像力这样的运动感觉)、交互范式(例如，被动感觉、主动探索)和多种物理技术(例如，机械驱动、电效应、知觉错觉)而变化。研究人员现在反复解决同样的问题：我们无法分享或改编我们创建的触觉内容，因为它是为专门的硬件设计的，不能翻译到其他环境中。在拟议的研究计划中，我的目标是在触觉反馈的不同形式中抽象触觉内容定义。具体地说，我和我的团队将开发一个跨不同环境共享触觉内容的软件平台，目标有三：1.建立一个在线系统(Haptiverse)，用于可扩展地创建和共享异类触觉内容。我和我的团队将使用程序生成技术，使用大型(1000+)触觉内容数据集来填充它。一旦建成，我们将设计智能推荐系统和搜索技术，以便研究人员能够找到内容。2.创建跨不同硬件环境的更高级别的触觉内容规范。触觉反馈高度依赖于物理设置和用户环境，研究人员必须根据他们的特定环境调整或重新创建内容。我们的目标是推广触觉内容的规范，使其能够自动“编译”到不同的硬件环境中。3.利用开发的平台对触觉系统进行原创性研究。我和我的团队将反复设计和构建触觉系统，以驱动内容创作并提供示例硬件环境。开发的平台可以在每个系统上迭代测试。目前，我计划针对两个示例领域：全自动驾驶汽车中的触觉反馈，以及治疗师和最终用户对心理健康的触觉反馈的使用。通过开发一个跨硬件环境共享内容的软件平台，我和我的团队将加快触觉技术的研究，尽管该技术仍在不断进步和多样化。

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.