Brewster, S.A.

Wall, S.

English

Enlighten: Publications

 
 
 
 
 
 
Wall, S. and Brewster, S.A. (2005) Hands-on haptics: exploring non-
visual visualization using the sense of touch. In, CHI '05 Conference on 
Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2-7 April 2005, pages pp. 2140-
2141, Portland, Oregon.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/3216/ 
 
 
 
 
Glasgow ePrints Service 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk 
Hands-on Haptics: Exploring Non-Visual Visualization 
Using The Sense of Touch 
Steven Wall and Stephen Brewster 
Glasgow Interactive Systems Group, Department of Computing Science 
University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK 
e-mail: steven, stephen @dcs.gla.ac.uk 
Tel.: +44 (0)141 330 4966 
 
 
ACM Classification 
H5.2 User Interfaces. (D2.2, H1.2, I3.6). Haptic I/O. 
INTRODUCTION 
The explosion of software applications, digitally stored data 
and the subsequent growth in on-line communities, has 
frequently been denied to visually impaired and blind 
computer users due to the visual-centric nature of 
presentation methods employed. Haptic interfaces, such as 
force feedback and tactile devices, offer the opportunity to 
present dynamic “visualizations” in a non-visual manner to 
the sense of touch: whether the data being visualized is real-
time stock exchange data in the form of a graph, maps from 
route-finding applications, or the progress of a multiplayer 
on-line game. In keeping with the 2005 conference theme of 
the relationship between technology and community, this 
workshop will explore ways that this information can be 
made available to visually impaired and blind users, or in 
situations within which visual feedback is problematic (when 
the visual sense is overloaded or otherwise occupied e.g. on 
the move, performing a visual monitoring task etc.). Haptic 
devices are also potentially useful as a means of providing 
extra parameters for use in multidimensional visualization for 
sighted users, in addition to visual cues.  
The first devices for haptic force feedback were developed 
within the field of teleoperation, to provide tighter sensory 
coupling between a human operator and remotely operated 
robotic manipulator [3]. The introduction of the first 
commercially available force feedback devices in the mid-
1990s, for example, the PHANToM from Sensable 
Technologies [5] brought force feedback to the desktop. 
Subsequently, there has been an explosion in the number and 
variety of applications designed with haptic interaction. 
Previous workshops in this area have brought together 
researchers from many diverse areas including mechanical 
and electrical engineering, human computer interaction 
(HCI), perception and psychophysics, and art and design. For 
example, workshops and symposiums in 2000, 2002 and 
2004 have looked at the issues facing haptics in the field of 
HCI [2], touch and blindness [1], and haptics in multimodal 
visualization (www.m2vis.org), respectively. A number of 
papers have appeared in CHI related to this topic, for 
example, Oakley et al. reported on the use of haptics as a 
means of reducing visual overload in a conventional desktop 
[6]. Sjostrom outlined a number of guidelines for using 
haptic technology to provide novel computer interaction 
techniques for visually impaired people [7]. Finally, Wall and 
Brewster discussed the use of material properties as a means 
of presenting numerical data in haptic visualizations [8].  
These workshops and papers have highlighted the fact that 
haptic interfaces offer a potential means of making 
visualizations of data available to the blind and visually 
impaired community, and to provide an alternative to visual 
presentation of information in desktop applications. 
However, haptic approaches to visualization have, almost 
without exception, attempted to recreate common, visually-
mediated representations of data, such as bar charts and line 
graphs. This workshop will encourage designers to think 
outside the box in terms of creating haptic visualizations. The 
haptic sense is different to the visual sense in many ways, 
including being localized to a small number of contact points 
with the external environment. Uniquely amongst the five 
senses, it is bidirectional, being able to interact with objects 
as well as sense their properties. The sense of touch is of a 
very high resolution, and is often socially loaded, or 
associated with non-verbal communication and expression 
[4]. Visualizations designed for the haptic sense should 
therefore be seeking to exploit potential benefits of these 
features, rather than pandering to established visual 
conventions. Locating the workshop within a CHI conference 
will promote interdisciplinary communication within an 
international environment, where a combination of industry, 
designers and users can contribute their unique perspectives.      
This workshop is timely and important for the haptic research 
community, as haptic technologies have still to find 
widespread application outside “high cost, low volume” 
domains such as medical simulation and training, the oil and 
gas industries, industrial teleoperation and specialist 3D 
modeling and design applications. The availability of more 
compact, lower cost devices suitable for the desktop have put 
 
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). 
CHI 2005, April 2–7, 2004, Portland, Oregon, USA. 
ACM 1-59593-002-7/05/0004. 
force feedback interfaces within the reach of individuals and 
small to medium sized institutions such as schools and 
colleges, creating a potentially much wider base of users. 
Hence there is an increased need to develop heuristics, 
guidelines and standards for their use. This workshop will 
bring together practitioners from industry and academia 
focused on establishing guidelines for the use of haptics in 
visualization. 
GOALS 
This workshop will bring together a small group consisting 
of designers, developers and users of haptic interface devices, 
specifically in the context of visualization of numerical or 
other data in a non-visual manner. We are looking to attract 
attendees to stimulate exchange and brainstorming, with the 
following aims: 
1. Review and discuss current examples of haptic 
visualizations with a view to identifying common 
solutions, new directions and unsolved challenges. 
2. Collate shared experiences and results from designing 
with haptic feedback, designing and working with the 
visually impaired community, perceptual and 
psychophysical results with implications for designing 
using haptics.  
3. Discuss whether haptic visualizations should be 
adopting conventions used in commonly encountered 
visual representations of data (for example, pie charts, 
bar charts, line graphs), or whether there are alternative 
designs more suited to the haptic sense. 
4. Create tangible mock-ups which exemplify successful or 
promising design strategies identified by the workshop 
participants. 
 
STRUCTURE 
The workshop will consist of two days. Day one will be for 
participants to give their position statements in the form of a 
short talk but more importantly, a demo. The talk and demo 
will focus on the problems and potential solutions involved 
with haptic visualization. Hands on demos will be 
emphasized as this is a vital aspect of the workshop that 
would not be possible during a paper session or with a larger 
gathering of attendees. Discussion between participants 
following the demos and presentations will be encouraged. 
By the end of the day we will have a description of the 
problems, potential strengths and drawbacks of haptic 
presentation, and also some potential design 
suggestions/solutions.  
Day two will be the hands on day! Participants will work 
together in small groups to produce one or more tangible 
mock-ups of haptic visualizations exemplifying the design 
solutions worked out during day one. The designs will not be 
competing as such, but it will likely be difficult to include all 
of the examples within one prototype. Raw materials for 
construction will be provided by the organizers, but 
participants will be expected to design with whatever 
materials come to hand, by seeking out examples of objects 
that demonstrate haptic properties that can be incorporated in 
to the design to illustrate the principles. A spokesperson for 
each group will then present the prototype to the workshop 
members, followed by a discussion. At the culmination of the 
second day, and the workshop as a whole, the participants 
will have further refined the design solutions for haptic 
visualizations, and have documented examples of tangible 
mock-ups which can be taken forward for development with 
haptic interface devices. 
OUTCOMES OF THE WORKSHOP 
Outcomes of the workshop will be disseminated to the wider 
community using a SIGCHI Bulletin article, and will be 
made available on a public workshop website. The organizers 
will submit a summary paper to a suitable conference 
disseminating the findings of the workshop to the haptics 
community.   
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
We acknowledge the funding of the EPSRC grant 
GR/S53251/01 “An investigation of the use of tactile 
displays for visualization for blind people” for support with 
organizing this workshop.  
REFERENCES 
1. Ballesteros, S. and Heller, M.A., Touch, blindness and 
neuroscience, Madrid: Universidad Nacional de 
Educacion a Distancia (UNED), 2004. 
2. Brewster, S. and Murray-Smith, R., Haptic HCI: First 
international workshop. Lecture notes in computer 
science. Vol. 2058, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2001. 
3. Burdea, G.C., Force and touch feedback for virtual 
reality, New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1996. 
4. Maclean, K.E.: Designing with haptic feedback, 
Symposium on Haptic Feedback in Proceedings of IEEE 
Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2000), San Francisco, 
CA, 22-28 April, (2000).  
5. Massie, T. and Salisbury, K.: The PHANToM haptic 
interface: A device for probing virtual objects, ASME 
Annual Winter Meeting, New York, (1994), 295-300. 
6. Oakley, I., McGee, M.R., Brewster, S., and Gray, P.: 
Putting the feel in "look and feel", ACM CHI 2000, The 
Hague, NL, 1-6 April, (2000), 415-422. 
7. Sjostrom, C.: Using haptics in computer interfaces for 
blind people, ACM CHI 2001, Seattle, WA, 31st March - 
5th April, (2001), 245-246. 
8. Wall, S. and Brewster, S.: Assessing haptic properties 
for data representation, ACM CHI 2003, Fort 
Lauderdale, FL, (2003), 858-859. 
 


Hands-on haptics: exploring non-visual visualization using the sense of touch

Enlighten

      Wall, S. and Brewster, S.A. (2005) Hands-on haptics: exploring non-visual visualization using the sense of touch. In, CHI '05 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2-7 April 2005, pages pp. 2140-2141, Portland, Oregon.       http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/3216/     Glasgow ePrints Service http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Hands-on Haptics: Exploring Non-Visual Visualization Using The Sense of Touch Steven Wall and Stephen Brewster Glasgow Interactive Systems Group, Department of Computing Science University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK e-mail: steven, stephen @dcs.gla.ac.uk Tel.: +44 (0)141 330 4966   ACM Classification H5.2 User Interfaces. (D2.2, H1.2, I3.6). Haptic I/O. INTRODUCTION The explosion of software applications, digitally stored data and the subsequent growth in on-line communities, has frequently been denied to visually impaired and blind computer users due to the visual-centric nature of presentation methods employed. Haptic interfaces, such as force feedback and tactile devices, offer the opportunity to present dynamic “visualizations” in a non-visual manner to the sense of touch: whether the data being visualized is real-time stock exchange data in the form of a graph, maps from route-finding applications, or the progress of a multiplayer on-line game. In keeping with the 2005 conference theme of the relationship between technology and community, this workshop will explore ways that this information can be made available to visually impaired and blind users, or in situations within which visual feedback is problematic (when the visual sense is overloaded or otherwise occupied e.g. on the move, performing a visual monitoring task etc.). Haptic devices are also potentially useful as a means of providing extra parameters for use in multidimensional visualization for sighted users, in addition to visual cues.  The first devices for haptic force feedback were developed within the field of teleoperation, to provide tighter sensory coupling between a human operator and remotely operated robotic manipulator [3]. The introduction of the first commercially available force feedback devices in the mid-1990s, for example, the PHANToM from Sensable Technologies [5] brought force feedback to the desktop. Subsequently, there has been an explosion in the number and variety of applications designed with haptic interaction. Previous workshops in this area have brought together researchers from many diverse areas including mechanical and electrical engineering, human computer interaction (HCI), perception and psychophysics, and art and design. For example, workshops and symposiums in 2000, 2002 and 2004 have looked at the issues facing haptics in the field of HCI [2], touch and blindness [1], and haptics in multimodal visualization (www.m2vis.org), respectively. A number of papers have appeared in CHI related to this topic, for example, Oakley et al. reported on the use of haptics as a means of reducing visual overload in a conventional desktop [6]. Sjostrom outlined a number of guidelines for using haptic technology to provide novel computer interaction techniques for visually impaired people [7]. Finally, Wall and Brewster discussed the use of material properties as a means of presenting numerical data in haptic visualizations [8].  These workshops and papers have highlighted the fact that haptic interfaces offer a potential means of making visualizations of data available to the blind and visually impaired community, and to provide an alternative to visual presentation of information in desktop applications. However, haptic approaches to visualization have, almost without exception, attempted to recreate common, visually-mediated representations of data, such as bar charts and line graphs. This workshop will encourage designers to think outside the box in terms of creating haptic visualizations. The haptic sense is different to the visual sense in many ways, including being localized to a small number of contact points with the external environment. Uniquely amongst the five senses, it is bidirectional, being able to interact with objects as well as sense their properties. The sense of touch is of a very high resolution, and is often socially loaded, or associated with non-verbal communication and expression [4]. Visualizations designed for the haptic sense should therefore be seeking to exploit potential benefits of these features, rather than pandering to established visual conventions. Locating the workshop within a CHI conference will promote interdisciplinary communication within an international environment, where a combination of industry, designers and users can contribute their unique perspectives.      This workshop is timely and important for the haptic research community, as haptic technologies have still to find widespread application outside “high cost, low volume” domains such as medical simulation and training, the oil and gas industries, industrial teleoperation and specialist 3D modeling and design applications. The availability of more compact, lower cost devices suitable for the desktop have put  Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI 2005, April 2–7, 2004, Portland, Oregon, USA. ACM 1-59593-002-7/05/0004. force feedback interfaces within the reach of individuals and small to medium sized institutions such as schools and colleges, creating a potentially much wider base of users. Hence there is an increased need to develop heuristics, guidelines and standards for their use. This workshop will bring together practitioners from industry and academia focused on establishing guidelines for the use of haptics in visualization. GOALS This workshop will bring together a small group consisting of designers, developers and users of haptic interface devices, specifically in the context of visualization of numerical or other data in a non-visual manner. We are looking to attract attendees to stimulate exchange and brainstorming, with the following aims: 1. Review and discuss current examples of haptic visualizations with a view to identifying common solutions, new directions and unsolved challenges. 2. Collate shared experiences and results from designing with haptic feedback, designing and working with the visually impaired community, perceptual and psychophysical results with implications for designing using haptics.  3. Discuss whether haptic visualizations should be adopting conventions used in commonly encountered visual representations of data (for example, pie charts, bar charts, line graphs), or whether there are alternative designs more suited to the haptic sense. 4. Create tangible mock-ups which exemplify successful or promising design strategies identified by the workshop participants.  STRUCTURE The workshop will consist of two days. Day one will be for participants to give their position statements in the form of a short talk but more importantly, a demo. The talk and demo will focus on the problems and potential solutions involved with haptic visualization. Hands on demos will be emphasized as this is a vital aspect of the workshop that would not be possible during a paper session or with a larger gathering of attendees. Discussion between participants following the demos and presentations will be encouraged. By the end of the day we will have a description of the problems, potential strengths and drawbacks of haptic presentation, and also some potential design suggestions/solutions.  Day two will be the hands on day! Participants will work together in small groups to produce one or more tangible mock-ups of haptic visualizations exemplifying the design solutions worked out during day one. The designs will not be competing as such, but it will likely be difficult to include all of the examples within one prototype. Raw materials for construction will be provided by the organizers, but participants will be expected to design with whatever materials come to hand, by seeking out examples of objects that demonstrate haptic properties that can be incorporated in to the design to illustrate the principles. A spokesperson for each group will then present the prototype to the workshop members, followed by a discussion. At the culmination of the second day, and the workshop as a whole, the participants will have further refined the design solutions for haptic visualizations, and have documented examples of tangible mock-ups which can be taken forward for development with haptic interface devices. OUTCOMES OF THE WORKSHOP Outcomes of the workshop will be disseminated to the wider community using a SIGCHI Bulletin article, and will be made available on a public workshop website. The organizers will submit a summary paper to a suitable conference disseminating the findings of the workshop to the haptics community.   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We acknowledge the funding of the EPSRC grant GR/S53251/01 “An investigation of the use of tactile displays for visualization for blind people” for support with organizing this workshop.  REFERENCES 1. Ballesteros, S. and Heller, M.A., Touch, blindness and neuroscience, Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED), 2004. 2. Brewster, S. and Murray-Smith, R., Haptic HCI: First international workshop. Lecture notes in computer science. Vol. 2058, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2001. 3. Burdea, G.C., Force and touch feedback for virtual reality, New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1996. 4. Maclean, K.E.: Designing with haptic feedback, Symposium on Haptic Feedback in Proceedings of IEEE Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2000), San Francisco, CA, 22-28 April, (2000).  5. Massie, T. and Salisbury, K.: The PHANToM haptic interface: A device for probing virtual objects, ASME Annual Winter Meeting, New York, (1994), 295-300. 6. Oakley, I., McGee, M.R., Brewster, S., and Gray, P.: Putting the feel in "look and feel", ACM CHI 2000, The Hague, NL, 1-6 April, (2000), 415-422. 7. Sjostrom, C.: Using haptics in computer interfaces for blind people, ACM CHI 2001, Seattle, WA, 31st March - 5th April, (2001), 245-246. 8. Wall, S. and Brewster, S.: Assessing haptic properties for data representation, ACM CHI 2003, Fort Lauderdale, FL, (2003), 858-859.  

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