Haptic Experience Design (HaXD) is a rather young and rapidly evolving discipline, with numerous authoring tools and design approaches proposed in recent years. Despite these advances, the design process itself remains underexplored, particularly in terms of how design decisions evolve over iterative sessions. In this paper, we present an exploratory approach that enables haptic designers (hapticians) to visually reflect on the evolution of vibrotactile experiences (tactons) over time. Our approach captures and visualizes the progression of tactons during design sessions, which can even last hours. By making the evolution of designs explicit, our method can support hapticians in identifying key design steps and iterations, which is particularly valuable in complex or collaborative workflows. Ultimately, we envision that such visualizations can inform the development of authoring tools that integrate versioning and iterative reflection, thereby advancing both the practice and methodology of HaXD.

Designing vibrotactile experiences collaboratively requires communicating using multiple senses. This is challenging in remote scenarios as designers need to effectively express and communicate their intention while iteratively building and refining experiences, ideally in real-time. We formulate design considerations for collaborative haptic design tools, and propose CollabJam, a collaborative prototyping suite enabling remote synchronous design of vibrotactile experiences for on-body applications. We first outline Collab-Jam's features and present a technical evaluation. Second, we use CollabJam to understand communication and design patterns used during haptic experience design. We performed an in-depth design evaluation spanning four sessions in which four pairs of participants designed and reviewed vibrotactile experiences remotely. A qualitative content analysis revealed how multi-sensory communication is essential to convey ideas, how stimulating the tactile sense can interfere with personal boundaries, and how freely placing actuators on the skin can provide both benefits and challenges.

Virtual environments are well-researched in the HCI community. Many approaches such Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVEs) and head-mounted displays require specialized hardware and are optimized for single users. Moreover, the focus on visualization neglects other sensory input we know from the real world such as odor or spatial sound, which only recently became a more prominent feature in consumer devices. Our research is focused on recording multiple sensorial media (mulsemedia) in the real world including rich visuals, spatial sound, and odors. We describe our technology stack to record and reproduce real world places in replicable immersive environments using standard equipment where possible. Consequently, we can support more realistic training simulations or create leisure environments for relaxation.

We present TactJam, an end-to-end suite for creating and sharing low fidelity prototypes of on-body vibrotactile feedback. With TactJam, designers can create, record and share vibrotactile patterns online. This opens up new ways of collaboratively designing vibrotactile patterns both in collocated as well as in remote settings. We evaluate TactJam in a two-part distributed online workshop, exploring the design of on-body tactons. Participants were able to successfully use TactJam to learn about tacton design. We present an overview of mappings between tactons and their associated concepts before comparing the results of tactons created using solely a GUI and tactons created through experimenting with placements directly on the body. Conducting both parts of the workshop separately highlighted the importance of designing directly with bodies: less implicit assumptions were made, and designs were guided by personal experience. We reflect on these results and close on deliberations for the future development of TactJam.

Tactons are vibrotactile patterns used to convey information. Conventionally, a small set of tactons is used on mobile phone or wearables to notify users of messages or emails received. However, tactons have multiple characteristics that one can vary to design a multitude of vibrotactile patterns. In addition, one can place vibrotactile actuators on different body areas to leverage the spatial dimension and the varying skin sensitivity across the body. Prior work proposed methods to design tactons based on musical or engineering knowledge, but hands-on methods remain scarce. For this studio, we adopt a hands-on approach for composing tactons. We leverage a simple instrument-like device that consists of vibrotactile actuators connected to dedicated buttons for designing tactons. While pressing a button, the corresponding actuator vibrates. Users can vary several characteristics of the tactons (e.g., duration and amplitude), and experience them in real time during the design process by placing the actuators on the body. These tactons can then be shared with other participants of the studio. Our goal with this studio is to observe users compose tactons collaboratively using a hands-on device, and better understand how they lay out the vibrotactile actuators on their body and what differences these layouts make in the tactile experience.