Designing effective haptic feedback is challenging due to the subjective nature of touch and the fact that multiple people cannot easily share and evaluate touch experiences. In this work, we propose CoTacs, a collaborative haptic toolkit to address the challenges of haptic feedback design by enabling designers to explore haptic experiences together using group collaboration and allowing them to refine ideas quickly through early feedback during the design process. Two design sessions with five collaborators each show that CoTacs enables users to design, evaluate, refine and explore haptic feedback together. Participants leveraged group feedback to improve their designs and inspire creative ideas for the second collaboration round. Our work demonstrates how collaborative haptic toolkits can enable synergistic effects through interactions between the designers, benefiting haptic feedback design while still exposing several limitations. We discuss different opportunities for the design of future collaborative haptic toolkits and haptic group collaboration techniques.

Technology integration in educational settings has led to the development of novel sensor-based tools that enable students to measure and interact with their environment. Although reports from using such tools can be positive, evaluations are often conducted under controlled conditions and short timeframes. There is a need for longitudinal data collected in realistic classroom settings. However, sustained and authentic classroom use requires technology platforms to be seen by teachers as both easy to use and of value. We describe our development of a sensor-based platform to support science teaching that followed a 14-month design process. We share insights from this design and development approach, and report findings from a six-month large-scale evaluation involving 35 schools and 1245 students. We share lessons learnt, including that technology integration is not an educational goal per se and that technology should be a transparent tool to enable students to achieve their learning goals.

The sense of touch offers interesting possibilities as a robust and ubiquitous communication channel. In this paper, we present OM, a tool that enables users to design subjective vibrotactile expressions associated with contextualised information relevant to them. OM consists of a pair of wrist-worn devices that can reproduce complex vibrotactile symbols and a companion editor smartphone app that allows users to create, customise and store personalised expressions. We studied OM in real-world contexts by allowing 13 participants to explore the functionalities of OM throughout their daily interactions with complete autonomy. We highlight relevant scenarios, design considerations, and future directions towards a tool that can help people unveil an alternative, ubiquitous and private communication system accessible to all.

We present a wearable forearm augmentation that enables the recreation of natural touch sensation by applying shear-forces onto the skin. In contrast to previous approaches, we arrange light-weight and stretchable 3x3cm plasters in a matrix onto the skin. Individual plasters were embedded with lines of shape-memory alloy (SMA) wires to generate shear-forces. Our design is informed by a series of studies investigating the perceptibility of different sizes, spacings, and attachments of plasters on the forearm. Our matrix arrangement enables the perception of touches, for instance, feeling ones wrist being grabbed or the arm being stroked. Users rated the recreated touch sensations as being fairly similar to a real touch (4.1/5). Even without a visual representation, users were able to correctly distinguish them with an overall accuracy of 94.75%. Finally, we explored two use cases showing how AR and VR could be empowered with experiencing recreated touch sensations on the forearm.

In this paper, we present M-Hair, a novel method for providing tactile feedback by stimulating only the body hair without touching the skin. It works by applying passive magnetic materials to the body hair, which is actuated by external magnetic fields. Our user study suggested that the value of the M-hair mechanism is in inducing affective sensations such as pleasantness, rather than effectively discriminating features such as shape, size, and direction. This work invites future research to use this method in applications that induce emotional responses or affective states, and as a research tool for investigations of this novel sensation.

Learning a musical instrument can be a challenging task for a deaf person due to limited access to sound. Prior work has developed visual and vibrotactile approaches to provide music-to-sound feedback to deaf people. However, these systems are not designed for ad-hoc access to sound, which enables a deaf person to explore sound from various audio sources and receive real-time feedback. In this paper we present the development of a music sensory substitution system that enables ad-hoc access to musical sounds. It provides the technical basis to study deeper research questions about understanding and creating sound.