A force feedback haptic interface for atomic force microscopy

Integrating a force feedback haptic device with atomic force microscopy (AFM) improves the capability to investigate and manipulate the objects on a micro- and nanoscale surface. The haptic device provides the researcher with a sense of touch and movement by changing the position of the stylus or amount of force on it. The developed system\u27s concept is to provide the user a sense and feel and control of the AFM probe at the nanoscale. By positing the haptic stylus, the user generates reference to commands to the AFM probe. In turn, forces experienced by the probe are communicated to the haptic and transferred to the user. In order to ensure that the forces that act on the haptic and the probe are accurate, it is important to calibrate the normal and lateral forces that act on the tip of the probe. These forces are generated due to using a contact mode interaction between the probe tip and the sample surface. The haptic-probe coupled motion is tested to reach the desired results. Also, a low pass filter is used to remove the undesirable high frequency content from the input force to the haptic since it affects the interaction between the probe s tip and the sample s surface. To close, the sensitivities of haptic to the probe position, and displacement of the probe to the force on the haptic are discussed --Abstract, page iii

Harder and Smoother on Touchscreens? How Interaction Mode Affects Consumer Product Judgment

Emerging technologies, such as touchscreen interaction and mid-air gesture-based interaction, are changing the ways we interact with products virtually. However, despite research on how these technologies can be leveraged to improve consumers’ shopping experience, few studies have explored how they affect consumer product judgment. This study explores how two types of gesture-based human-device interaction modes (i.e., touchscreen interaction and mid-air interaction) influence consumers’ judgment on product haptic attributes (i.e., softness and roughness). Results from a lab experiment reveal that interacting with a product via touchscreen, as compared via a mid-air gesture controller, leads to a lower perception of product softness and roughness. Furthermore, such effects are more salient among users with a higher level of need for touch. The results imply that people may mistakenly use the incidental haptic experience gained from interaction device (e.g., the solid and smooth haptic experience a user feels when interacting with touchscreen surface) in product judgment although such experience is not directly related to the product being evaluated. Theoretical contributions, practical implications, and future research are discussed

Design and evaluation of haptic feedback for in-vehicle touch screens

The main topic of this project is the introduction of haptic feedback for touch screens in an in-vehicle environment. Due to the numerous studies on confirmation haptic feedback, this project regards navigation haptic feedback. The importance of this project is to provide an overview of this kind of haptic feedback. Also, to prove the ability of touch screens to assist drivers in the interaction with a multifunctional device in a driving situation. For this purpose, an introduction of the background was carried out, including touch screens, technologies producing haptic feedback, the sense of touch and users in a driving situation. From this, two conclusions were taken. First, the kind of touch screen that most suits an in-vehicle environment is a multicapacitive touch screen. Also, that the best technology to produce navigation haptic feedback is the texture surface changing. Taking these results into consideration a prototype was implemented. This prototype was tested in a usability study. The main problem found out during the usability study is the long learnability time needed by the participants due to the new way of interaction introduced to be able to navigate. From the information of the usability study the following results have been extracted. The actions that were helped by the introduction of navigation haptic feedback were navigation across items and level selectors. It has been shown that a standardized selection of haptic feedback is needed in order to reduce learnability time and introduce guessability in future touch screen devices. Some more studies, when looking upon different traffic situations must be carried out in order to understand if also theese conditions require the same amount of help introduced by navigation haptic feedback. An important result of this project is that none of the participants in the usability study turned off the optional haptic feedback, when this was included in their multifunctional in-vehicle device. This shown a trust on haptics that has to be seen as a motive to continue working on it.Outgoin

Impact of haptic 'touching' technology on cultural applications

No abstract available

An Evaluation of Input Controls for In-Car Interactions

The way drivers operate in-car systems is rapidly changing as traditional physical controls, such as buttons and dials, are being replaced by touchscreens and touch-sensing surfaces. This has the potential to increase driver distraction and error as controls may be harder to find and use. This paper presents an in-car, on the road driving study which examined three key types of input controls to investigate their effects: a physical dial, pressure-based input on a touch surface and touch input on a touchscreen. The physical dial and pressure-based input were also evaluated with and without haptic feedback. The study was conducted with users performing a list-based targeting task using the different controls while driving on public roads. Eye-gaze was recorded to measure distraction from the primary task of driving. The results showed that target accuracy was high across all input methods (greater than 94%). Pressure-based targeting was the slowest while directly tapping on the targets was the faster selection method. Pressure-based input also caused the largest number of glances towards to the touchscreen but the duration of each glance was shorter than directly touching the screen. Our study will enable designers to make more appropriate design choices for future in-car interactions

An Evaluation of Touch and Pressure-Based Scrolling and Haptic Feedback for In-car Touchscreens

An in-car study was conducted to examine different input techniques for list-based scrolling tasks and the effectiveness of haptic feedback for in-car touchscreens. The use of physical switchgear on centre consoles is decreasing which allows designers to develop new ways to interact with in-car applications. However, these new methods need to be evaluated to ensure they are usable. Therefore, three input techniques were tested: direct scrolling, pressure-based scrolling and scrolling using onscreen buttons on a touchscreen. The results showed that direct scrolling was less accurate than using onscreen buttons and pressure input, but took almost half the time when compared to the onscreen buttons and was almost three times quicker than pressure input. Vibrotactile feedback did not improve input performance but was preferred by the users. Understanding the speed vs. accuracy trade-off between these input techniques will allow better decisions when designing safer in-car interfaces for scrolling applications

Touching the invisible: Localizing ultrasonic haptic cues

While mid-air gestures offer new possibilities to interact with or around devices, some situations, such as interacting with applications, playing games or navigating, may require visual attention to be focused on a main task. Ultrasonic haptic feedback can provide 3D spatial haptic cues that do not demand visual attention for these contexts. In this paper, we present an initial study of active exploration of ultrasonic haptic virtual points that investigates the spatial localization with and without the use of the visual modality. Our results show that, when providing haptic feedback giving the location of a widget, users perform 50% more accurately compared to providing visual feedback alone. When provided with a haptic location of a widget alone, users are more than 30% more accurate than when given a visual location. When aware of the location of the haptic feedback, active exploration decreased the minimum recommended widget size from 2cm2 to 1cm2 when compared to passive exploration from previous studies. Our results will allow designers to create better mid-air interactions using this new form of haptic feedback