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.

International audience

Society is more technologically connected than ever, yet older adults are often excluded from design considerations. As a result, technologies may fail to meet their needs and can exacerbate loneliness and social isolation. This pictorial presents a co-design approach using embodied methods to explore how people in later life experience connectedness across distance. Fifteen adults aged 63 to 79 participated in prototyping, collage, and movement practices as cognitive scaffolds to express tacit knowledge. We present five concepts developed by participants, each materialized as a narrative object. These tangible artifacts acted as boundary objects, facilitating shared understanding between researchers and participants and becoming central to the design dialog. This process surfaced insights, including the importance of communicating as equal partners, navigating time complexity, valuing sensorial and nonverbal interaction, and embracing play and aesthetic expression. This work demonstrates how co-creative methods can generate insights for co-design and embodied interaction within HCI.

In Virtual Reality (VR), rendering realistic forces is crucial for immersion, but traditional vibrotactile feedback fails to convey force sensations effectively. Studies of asymmetric vibrations that elicit pseudo forces show promise but are inherently tied to unwanted vibrations, reducing realism. Leveraging sensory attenuation to reduce the perceived intensity of self-generated vibrations during user movement, we present a novel algorithm that couples asymmetric vibrations with user motion, which mimics self-generated sensations. Our psychophysics study with 12 participants shows that motion-coupled asymmetric vibration attenuates the experience of vibration (equivalent to a ∼30% reduction in vibration-amplitude) while preserving the experience of force, compared to continuous asymmetric vibrations (state-of-the-art). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in VR through three scenarios: shooting arrows, lifting weights, and simulating haptic magnets. Results revealed that participants preferred forces elicited by motion-coupled asymmetric vibration for tasks like shooting arrows and lifting weights. This research highlights the potential of motion-coupled asymmetric vibrations, offers new insights into sensory attenuation, and advances force rendering in VR.

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.

We present vARitouch, a back-of-the-finger wearable that can modify the perceived tactile material properties of the uninstrumented world around us: vARitouch can modulate the perceived softness of a rigid object through a vibrotactile compliance illusion. As vARitouch does not cover the fingertip, all-natural tactile properties are preserved. We provide three contributions: (1) We demonstrate the feasibility of the concept through a psychophysics study, showing that virtual compliance can be continuously modulated, and perceived softness can be increased by approximately 30 Shore A levels. (2) A qualitative study indicates the desirability of such a device, showing that a back-of-the-finger haptic device has many attractive qualities. (3) To implement vARitouch, we identify a novel way to measure pressure from the back of the finger by repurposing a pulse oximetry sensor. Based on these contributions, we present the finalized vARitouch system, accompanied by a series of application scenarios.

We present a method for 3D printing objects with variable softness inspired by mechanical metamaterials. These printed cellular structures can provide users with varying experiences of compliance across different scales through changes in their parametrized cell geometries. With our approach and tool, we want to enable designers and makers to rapidly prototype objects with variable softness as a base for diverse applications. The hereby generated structures are adaptable for fabrication on both high-end and commodity 3D printers. Four participants engaged in hands-on exploration with such 3D printed samples, providing initial data on how cell-parameters might affect the subjective/qualitative experience of compliance. In future research, we will systematically investigate such relationships to better understand how these structures can be designed to achieve desired perceived properties.

This studio aims to collaboratively build foot augmentations, experiment with different materials and techniques, and create new designs for low-cost, wearable, and accessible devices that can be used by researchers, makers, designers, and artists. Considering the heightened focus on the human body with the rise of AR/VR/XR technologies, foot augmentation has great potential. To explore this potential, we invite researchers, designers and artists to share their applications, experiences, and ideas while designing foot augmentations. Participants will share knowledge, brainstorm ideas, and explore tools and materials for rapid prototyping. Finally, they will tinker and explore, discussing their design strategies to derive common approaches and best practices. Based on the hands-on session results, we will write a paper on design strategies for foot augmentation that will help facilitate more sustainable investigations and design of future foot interfaces.

The increasing proliferation of AI and GenAI requires new interfaces tailored to how their specific affordances and human requirements meet. As GenAI is capable of taking over tasks from users on an unprecedented scale, designing the experience of agency – if and how users experience control over the process and attribution of the outcome – is crucial. As an initial step towards design guidelines for shaping agency, we present a study that explores how properties of AI-generated images influence users’ experience of agency. We use two measures; temporal binding to implicitly estimate pre-reflective agency and magnitude estimation to assess user judgments of agency. We observe that abstract images lead to more temporal binding than images with semantic meaning. In contrast, the closer an image aligns with what a user might expect, the higher the agency judgment. When comparing the experiment results with objective metrics of image differences, we find that temporal binding results correlate with semantic differences, while agency judgments are better explained by local differences between images. This work contributes towards a future where agency is considered an important design dimension for GenAI interfaces.

When vibrations are synchronized with our actions, we experience them as material properties. This has been used to create virtual experiences like friction, counter-force, compliance, or torsion. Implementing such experiences is non-trivial, requiring high temporal resolution in sensing, high fidelity tactile output, and low latency. To make this style of haptic feedback more accessible to non-domain experts, we present Haptic Servos: self-contained haptic rendering devices which encapsulate all timing-critical elements. We characterize Haptic Servos’ real-time performance, showing the system latency is <5 ms. We explore the subjective experiences they can evoke, highlighting that qualitatively distinct experiences can be created based on input mapping, even if stimulation parameters and algorithm remain unchanged. A workshop demonstrated that users new to Haptic Servos require approximately ten minutes to set up a basic haptic rendering system. Haptic Servos are open source, we invite others to copy and modify our design.

With most digital devices, vibrotactile feedback consists of rhythmic patterns of continuous vibration. In contrast, when interacting with physical objects, we experience many of their material properties through vibration which is not continuous, but dynamically coupled to our actions. We assume the first style of vibration to lead to hermeneutic mediation, while the second style leads to embodied mediation. What if both types of mediation could be used to design tactile symbols? To investigate this, five haptic experts designed tactile symbols using continuous and motion-coupled vibration. Experts were interviewed to understand their symbols and design approach. A thematic analysis revealed themes showing that lived experience and affective qualities shaped design choices, that experts optimized for passive or active symbols, and that they considered context as part of the design. Our study suggests that adding embodied experiences as a design resource changes how participants think of tactile symbol design, thus broadening the scope of the symbol by design for context, and expanding their affective repertoire as changing the type of vibration influences perceived valence and arousal.

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.