Haptic Computing: Abstracting Interactive Touch Feedback

三十年来，研究人员已经证明了触觉技术在改善我们生活方面的巨大潜力。通过让用户参与力和触觉提示等物理反馈，触觉丰富了具有触觉的交互系统：虚拟世界变得更加真实，信息更容易获取。大公司和初创公司都在将触觉技术带给最终用户，推动触觉技术走向无处不在的部署。触觉研究人员现在是他们自己成功的受害者。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，触觉反馈随着感觉而变化（例如，触觉感觉如压力和温度，动觉感觉如力），交互范例（例如，被动地感觉，主动地探索），以及多种物理技术（例如，机械致动、电效应、知觉错觉）。研究人员现在反复解决同样的问题：我们无法共享或调整我们创建的触觉内容，因为它是为专用硬件设计的，不能转换到其他环境。在拟议的研究计划中，我的目标是抽象的触觉内容定义的触觉反馈的不同形式。具体来说，我和我的团队将开发一个软件平台，在不同的上下文中共享触觉内容，目标有三个：1.构建一个在线系统（“Haptiverse”），用于可扩展地创建和共享异构触觉内容。我和我的团队将使用程序生成技术在其中填充大型（1000+）触觉内容数据集。一旦建成，我们将设计智能推荐系统和搜索技术，使研究人员可以找到内容。2.在不同的硬件环境中创建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上下文，研究人员必须根据其特定上下文调整或重新创建内容。我们的目标是推广规范的触觉内容，使其可以自动“编译”到不同的硬件环境。3.使用开发的平台进行触觉系统的原始研究。我和我的团队将反复设计和构建触觉系统，以驱动内容创建并提供示例硬件上下文。所开发的平台可以与每个系统进行迭代测试。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在心理健康方面使用触觉反馈。通过开发一个跨硬件环境共享内容的软件平台，我和我的团队将加速触觉技术的研究，即使该技术继续发展和多样化。

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.