10 research outputs found

    Printgets: an Open-Source Toolbox for Designing Vibrotactile Widgets with Industrial-Grade Printed Actuators and Sensors

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    International audienceNew technologies for printing sensors and actuators combine the flexibility of interface layouts of touchscreens with localized vibrotactile feedback, but their fabrication still requires industrial-grade facilities. Until these technologies become easily replicable, interaction designers need material for ideation. We propose an open-source hardware and software toolbox providing maker-grade tools for iterative design of vibrotactile widgets with industrial-grade printed sensors and actuators. Our hardware toolbox provides a mechanical structure to clamp and stretch printed sheets, and electronic boards to drive sensors and actuators. Our software toolbox expands the design space of haptic interaction techniques by reusing the wide palette of available audio processing algorithms to generate real-time vibrotactile signals. We validate our toolbox with the implementation of three exemplar interface elements with tactile feedback: buttons, sliders, touchpads

    Is Multimedia Multisensorial? - A Review of Mulsemedia Systems

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    © 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Mulsemedia - multiple sensorial media - makes possible the inclusion of layered sensory stimulation and interaction through multiple sensory channels. e recent upsurge in technology and wearables provides mulsemedia researchers a vehicle for potentially boundless choice. However, in order to build systems that integrate various senses, there are still some issues that need to be addressed. is review deals with mulsemedia topics remained insu ciently explored by previous work, with a focus on multi-multi (multiple media - multiple senses) perspective, where multiple types of media engage multiple senses. Moreover, it addresses the evolution of previously identi ed challenges in this area and formulates new exploration directions.This article was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under Grant Agreement no. 688503

    RecHap: An Interactive Recommender System For Navigating Large Dataset of Mid-Air Haptic Designs

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    Designing haptics is a difficult task especially when the user attempts to design a sensation from scratch for a novel experience. In the fields of visual and audio design, designers often use large example libraries for inspiration, supported by intelligent systems like recommender systems. In this thesis, we contribute a corpus of 5327 mid-air haptic designs (two orders of magnitude larger than existing haptic libraries), and use it to explore a new approach for both novices and experienced hapticians to use these examples in mid-air haptic design. RecHap design tool utilises an autoencoder-based recommendation system that suggests preexisting examples by sampling various regions of the encoded latent space. The tool also provides a graphical user interface for designers to visualize the sensation in 3D view, select previous designs, and bookmark favourites. According to the study conducted, it was evident that the tool allowed designers to quickly sketch ideas and experience them right away. Design suggestions encouraged collaboration, expression, exploration, and enjoyment, which improved creativity

    HapticHead - Augmenting Reality via Tactile Cues

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    Information overload is increasingly becoming a challenge in today's world. Humans have only a limited amount of attention to allocate between sensory channels and tend to miss or misjudge critical sensory information when multiple activities are going on at the same time. For example, people may miss the sound of an approaching car when walking across the street while looking at their smartphones. Some sensory channels may also be impaired due to congenital or acquired conditions. Among sensory channels, touch is often experienced as obtrusive, especially when it occurs unexpectedly. Since tactile actuators can simulate touch, targeted tactile stimuli can provide users of virtual reality and augmented reality environments with important information for navigation, guidance, alerts, and notifications. In this dissertation, a tactile user interface around the head is presented to relieve or replace a potentially impaired visual channel, called \emph{HapticHead}. It is a high-resolution, omnidirectional, vibrotactile display that presents general, 3D directional, and distance information through dynamic tactile patterns. The head is well suited for tactile feedback because it is sensitive to mechanical stimuli and provides a large spherical surface area that enables the display of precise 3D information and allows the user to intuitively rotate the head in the direction of a stimulus based on natural mapping. Basic research on tactile perception on the head and studies on various use cases of head-based tactile feedback are presented in this thesis. Several investigations and user studies have been conducted on (a) the funneling illusion and localization accuracy of tactile stimuli around the head, (b) the ability of people to discriminate between different tactile patterns on the head, (c) approaches to designing tactile patterns for complex arrays of actuators, (d) increasing the immersion and presence level of virtual reality applications, and (e) assisting people with visual impairments in guidance and micro-navigation. In summary, tactile feedback around the head was found to be highly valuable as an additional information channel in various application scenarios. Most notable is the navigation of visually impaired individuals through a micro-navigation obstacle course, which is an order of magnitude more accurate than the previous state-of-the-art, which used a tactile belt as a feedback modality. The HapticHead tactile user interface's ability to safely navigate people with visual impairments around obstacles and on stairs with a mean deviation from the optimal path of less than 6~cm may ultimately improve the quality of life for many people with visual impairments.Die Informationsüberlastung wird in der heutigen Welt zunehmend zu einer Herausforderung. Der Mensch hat nur eine begrenzte Menge an Aufmerksamkeit, die er zwischen den Sinneskanälen aufteilen kann, und neigt dazu, kritische Sinnesinformationen zu verpassen oder falsch einzuschätzen, wenn mehrere Aktivitäten gleichzeitig ablaufen. Zum Beispiel können Menschen das Geräusch eines herannahenden Autos überhören, wenn sie über die Straße gehen und dabei auf ihr Smartphone schauen. Einige Sinneskanäle können auch aufgrund von angeborenen oder erworbenen Erkrankungen beeinträchtigt sein. Unter den Sinneskanälen wird Berührung oft als aufdringlich empfunden, besonders wenn sie unerwartet auftritt. Da taktile Aktoren Berührungen simulieren können, können gezielte taktile Reize den Benutzern von Virtual- und Augmented Reality Anwendungen wichtige Informationen für die Navigation, Führung, Warnungen und Benachrichtigungen liefern. In dieser Dissertation wird eine taktile Benutzeroberfläche um den Kopf herum präsentiert, um einen möglicherweise beeinträchtigten visuellen Kanal zu entlasten oder zu ersetzen, genannt \emph{HapticHead}. Es handelt sich um ein hochauflösendes, omnidirektionales, vibrotaktiles Display, das allgemeine, 3D-Richtungs- und Entfernungsinformationen durch dynamische taktile Muster darstellt. Der Kopf eignet sich gut für taktiles Feedback, da er empfindlich auf mechanische Reize reagiert und eine große sphärische Oberfläche bietet, die die Darstellung präziser 3D-Informationen ermöglicht und es dem Benutzer erlaubt, den Kopf aufgrund der natürlichen Zuordnung intuitiv in die Richtung eines Reizes zu drehen. Grundlagenforschung zur taktilen Wahrnehmung am Kopf und Studien zu verschiedenen Anwendungsfällen von kopfbasiertem taktilem Feedback werden in dieser Arbeit vorgestellt. Mehrere Untersuchungen und Nutzerstudien wurden durchgeführt zu (a) der Funneling Illusion und der Lokalisierungsgenauigkeit von taktilen Reizen am Kopf, (b) der Fähigkeit von Menschen, zwischen verschiedenen taktilen Mustern am Kopf zu unterscheiden, (c) Ansätzen zur Gestaltung taktiler Muster für komplexe Arrays von Aktoren, (d) der Erhöhung des Immersions- und Präsenzgrades von Virtual-Reality-Anwendungen und (e) der Unterstützung von Menschen mit Sehbehinderungen bei der Führung und Mikronavigation. Zusammenfassend wurde festgestellt, dass taktiles Feedback um den Kopf herum als zusätzlicher Informationskanal in verschiedenen Anwendungsszenarien sehr wertvoll ist. Am interessantesten ist die Navigation von sehbehinderten Personen durch einen Mikronavigations-Hindernisparcours, welche um eine Größenordnung präziser ist als der bisherige Stand der Technik, der einen taktilen Gürtel als Feedback-Modalität verwendete. Die Fähigkeit der taktilen Benutzerschnittstelle HapticHead, Menschen mit Sehbehinderungen mit einer mittleren Abweichung vom optimalen Pfad von weniger als 6~cm sicher um Hindernisse und auf Treppen zu navigieren, kann letztendlich die Lebensqualität vieler Menschen mit Sehbehinderungen verbessern

    Diseño de interacciones vibrotáctiles en dispositivos móviles

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    El presente trabajo de grado se ubica en el área del diseño de experiencias de usuario que incluyen estímulos hápticos. El objetivo de esta tesina es contribuir con los diseñadores de estas experiencias mediante herramientas que se integren en su proceso de trabajo y faciliten la asociación de efectos de vibración con los otros componentes de las interfaces de usuario en aplicaciones móviles.Facultad de Informátic

    The Haptiverse: A Platform for Reuse of Haptic Content

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    Research into haptic technology has accelerated over the past decade, producing more devices and content than ever before. However, due to the innate diversity of its hardware and the sense of touch itself, existing haptic experiences are limited to a specific physical technology or interaction modality. To remedy this, we introduce the Haptiverse, a platform for reuse of heterogeneous haptic content. The collection will be designed to internally motivate hapticians, who are designers, researchers, or developers of haptic experiences, to share their work with the global haptics community. We implement design features to target each basic psychological need in order for users to feel internally motivated to continue to share their work using the collection. Our results show that there was a positive influence in users’ perceived competence when interacting with a multi-step form to upload content. Users’ perceived relatedness and autonomy were also positively influenced after reading the Haptiverse’s mission statement. In addition, novice hapticians reported higher levels of perceived relatedness after reading a mission statement that incorporated both autonomy and relatedness intrinsic goals. We present a minimum viable product of the Haptiverse and design recommendations to further support hapticians when sharing haptic content

    Exploitation of haptic renderings to communicate risk levels of falling

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    Falls represent a major cause of injury that could lead to death. This observation is even more accentuated in the elderly. Indeed, with aging comes some deterioration (gait disturbances, balance disorders, and sensory motor impairments) that may lead to falls. The research project presented in this thesis is focused on the problem of reducing the risk level of falling. This study proposes a solution for the communication of haptic information to reduce the risk of falling. This solution is part of the design of a haptic communication system in a controlled environment. This new system introduces the notion of haptic perception through the communication of information by touch using the foot, which the literature does not generally mention. For the design of this system, we first studied the use of tactile stimuli to evaluate the possibility of communicating a risk level through a haptic modality. Then, having hypothesized that some factors could influence the communication of stimuli representing the risk levels of falling, we conducted a second study to evaluate the effect of auditory disturbances during the communication of these stimuli. Third, to determine whether the user had the necessary time to act after the perception of the risk level, we analyzed a variation of the simple reaction time when walking on different types of soil. These results encouraged us to do a fourth assessment of reaction time using a new device coupled with a smartphone that can be positioned at different locations on the body. Several experiments have been done to validate each of the steps. With this, we can now communicate a risk level of falling to users through the haptic channel using an active device and easily differentiable stimuli. In addition, we can evaluate auditory factors during such a haptic perception. Finally, we can evaluate the physiological characteristics of the users (response time) while seated and while walking on different types of soil. Les chutes représentent une cause majeure de blessures pouvant entraîner la mort. Cette observation est encore plus accentuée chez les personnes âgées. En effet, avec le vieillissement, certaines détériorations (troubles de la démarche, troubles de l’équilibre, troubles sensorimoteurs) peuvent entraîner des chutes. Le projet de recherche présenté dans cette thèse fait partie du problème de la réduction du risque de chute. En particulier, cette étude propose une solution au problème de la réduction du risque de chute par la perception haptiques. Cette solution intègre la conception d’un système de communication haptique dans un environnement contrôlé. Ce nouveau système introduit la notion de perception haptique à travers la communication de l’information par le toucher avec le pied, que la littérature ne mentionne généralement pas. Pour cela nous avons d’abord étudié l’utilisation de stimuli tactiles pour évaluer la possibilité de communiquer un niveau de risque par la modalité haptique. Puis, ayant émis l’hypothèse que certains facteurs pourraient influencer la communication de ces stimuli, nous avons mené une deuxième étude pour évaluer l’impact des perturbations auditives lors de la perception haptique du niveau de risque. Troisièmement, afin de savoir si l’utilisateur avait le temps nécessaire pour agir après la perception du niveau de risque, nous avons analysé la variation du temps de réaction simple en marchant sur différents types de sols. Les résultats obtenus dans cette dernière étude nous ont motivé à faire une quatrième évaluation du temps de réaction mais en utilisant un nouveau dispositif couplé à un smartphone qui peut être positionné à différents endroits du corps. Plusieurs expériences ont été réalisées pour valider chacune des étapes. Avec toutes ces études, nous pouvons maintenant communiquer aux utilisateurs un niveau de risque à travers le canal haptique en utilisant un dispositif actif et des stimuli facilement différentiables. En outre, nous pouvons évaluer les facteurs externes (auditifs) au cours d’une telle perception haptique. Enfin, nous pouvons évaluer les caractéristiques physiologiques des utilisateurs (temps de réponse) en position assise et en marchant sur différents types de sols

    Socially intelligent robots that understand and respond to human touch

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    Touch is an important nonverbal form of interpersonal interaction which is used to communicate emotions and other social messages. As interactions with social robots are likely to become more common in the near future these robots should also be able to engage in tactile interaction with humans. Therefore, the aim of the research presented in this dissertation is to work towards socially intelligent robots that can understand and respond to human touch. To become a socially intelligent actor a robot must be able to sense, classify and interpret human touch and respond to this in an appropriate manner. To this end we present work that addresses different parts of this interaction cycle. The contributions of this dissertation are the following. We have made a touch gesture dataset available to the research community and have presented benchmark results. Furthermore, we have sparked interest into the new field of social touch recognition by organizing a machine learning challenge and have pinpointed directions for further research. Also, we have exposed potential difficulties for the recognition of social touch in more naturalistic settings. Moreover, the findings presented in this dissertation can help to inform the design of a behavioral model for robot pet companions that can understand and respond to human touch. Additionally, we have focused on the requirements for tactile interaction with robot pets for health care applications
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