Haptic Systems in User Interfaces

Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, 2009

Haptic interaction has for a long time been a promise that has not fully been realized in everyday technology due to several reasons. Already for more than 20 years the research community in the field of human-technology interaction has identified multimodal interaction as a potential next mainstream interaction paradigm to replace graphical user interfaces. At the same time, both personal computers and mobile devices have developed rapidly allowing more computing power, more sophisticated feedback through different channels such as display and audio, and more ways of interaction to be used in everyday computing tasks. Within the past few years, haptic interaction has been under rapid research and development. In this article, we will give an introduction to the present state of the art in haptic interaction technology and its promises in mainstream information and communication technology.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2001

This paper presents a short review of the history surrounding the development of haptic feedback systems, from early manipulators and telerobots, used in the nuclear and subsea industries, to today's impressive desktop devices, used to support real-time interaction with 3D visual simulations, or Virtual Reality. Four examples of recent VR projects are described, illustrating the use of haptic feedback in ceramics, aerospace, surgical and defence applications. These examples serve to illustrate the premise that haptic feedback systems have evolved much faster than their visual display counterparts and are, today, delivering impressive peripheral devices that are truly usable by non-specialist users of computing technology.

2017

Haptic technology is tactile feedback technology. Haptic technology take advantage of user sense of touch by applying force, vibration or motion to the user. Haptic refers to manipulation and sensing through touch. In the proposed paper we have discussed an overview, important concepts in haptic technology, discusses the most broadly used haptics system like 'phantom', 'cyberglove' devices. We have explained in details how haptic technology implemented in various fields of study. In the proposed paper also includes how haptic technology works, its applications its advantages, its disadvantages, and its future applications.

Sensor Review, 2004

Haptic interfaces enable person‐machine communication through touch, and most commonly, in response to user movements. We comment on a distinct property of haptic interfaces, that of providing for simultaneous information exchange between a user and a machine. We also comment on the fact that, like other kinds of displays, they can take advantage of both the strengths and the limitations of human perception. The paper then proceeds with a description of the components and the modus operandi of haptic interfaces, followed by a list of current and prospective applications and a discussion of a cross‐section of current device designs.

The 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 2021

Wearable vibrotactile devices have many potential applications, including sensory substitution for accessibility and notifcations. Currently, vibrotactile experimentation is done using large lab setups. However, most practical applications require standalone on-body devices and integration into small form factors. Such integration is time-consuming and requires expertise. With a goal to democratize wearable haptics we introduce VHP, a vibrotactile haptics platform. It includes a low-power miniature electronics board that can drive up to 12 independent channels of haptic signals with arbitrary waveforms at a 2 kHz sampling rate. The platform can drive vibrotactile actuators including linear resonant actuators and voice coils. The control hardware is battery-powered and programmable, and has multiple input options, including serial and Bluetooth, as well as the ability to synthesize haptic signals internally. We developed current-based loading sensing, thus allowing for unique features such as actuator auto-classifcation, and skin-contact quality sensing. Our technical evaluations showed that the system met all our initial design criteria and is an improvement over prior methods as it allows all-day wear, has low latency, has battery life between 3 and 25 hours, and can run 12 actuators simultaneously. We demonstrate unique applications that would be timeconsuming to develop without the VHP platform. We show that VHP can be used as bracelet, sleeve and phone-case form factors. The bracelet was programmed with an audio-to-tactile interface and was successfully worn for multiple days over months by developers. To facilitate more use of this platform, we open-source our design and plan to make the hardware widely available. We hope this work will motivate the use and study of vibrotactile all-day wearable devices. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Haptic devices. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

2004

This paper presents work we have done on the design and implementation of an untethered system to deliver haptic cues for use in immersive virtual environments through a body-worn garment. Our system can control a large number of body-worn vibration units, each with individually controllable vibration intensity. Several design iterations have helped us to refine the system and improve such aspects as robustness, ease of donning and doffing, weight, power consumption, cable management, and support for many different types of feedback units, such as pager motors, solenoids, and muffin fans. In addition, experience integrating the system into an advanced virtual reality system has helped define some of the design constraints for creating wearable solutions, and to further refine our implementation.

Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception - SAP '13, 2013

Mobile and wearable embedded devices connect the user with digital information in a continuous and pervasive way. The need for portability and unobtrusiveness limits the possibilities of user interaction with such devices, challenging the designer to exploit new input and output modalities. A key benefit is given by the possibility to use multi-modal interaction capabilities that can dynamically act on different human senses and the cooperative capabilities of the small and pervasive devices. In this scenario we present HapticLib, a software library for the development and implementation of vibro-tactile feedback on resource-constrained embedded devices. It was designed to offer a high level programming interface for the rendering of haptic patterns, accurately modeling the nature of vibro-tactile actuators and different touch experiences.

Communications of the ACM, 2011

After more than 20 years of research and development, are haptic interfaces finally getting ready to enter the computing mainstream? E Ve R S I N Ce the first silentmode cell phones started buzzing in our pockets a few years ago, many of us have unwittingly developed a fumbling familiarity with haptics: technology that invokes our sense of touch. Video games now routinely employ force-feedback joysticks to jolt their players with a sense of impending onscreen doom, while more sophisticated haptic devices have helped doctors conduct surgeries from afar, allowed deskbound soldiers to operate robots in hazardous environments, and equipped musicians with virtual violins. Despite recent technological advances, haptic interfaces have made only modest inroads into the mass consumer market. Buzzing cell phones and shaking joysticks aside, developers have yet to create a breakthrough product-a device that would do for haptics what the iPhone has done for touch screens. The slow pace of market acceptance stems partly from typical new-technology growing pains: high production costs, the lack of standard application programming interfaces (APIs), and the absence of established user interface conventions. Those issues aside, however, a bigger question looms over this fledgling industry: What are haptics good for, exactly? Computer scientists have been exploring haptics for more than two decades. Early research focused largely on the problem of sensory substitution, converting imagery or speech information into electric or vibratory stimulation patterns on the skin. As the technology matured, haptics found new applications in teleoperator systems and virtual environments, useful for robotics and flight simulator applications. Today, some researchers think the big promise of haptics may involve

Interacting with Computers, 2009

For hand-object interaction in real situations the interplay between the local tactile interaction and force interaction seems to be very important. In current haptic interfaces, however, two different trends are present: force feedback devices which offer a permanent invariable grip and a resultant force, and tactile devices, which offer variable local patterns, often used for texture rendering. The purpose of the present work is to combine the two types of devices in a coherent manner. In the new device presented here, the tactile stimulation is obtained from strictly the same interaction loop, and obeys to the same physical model, as the force feedback, providing the information on the spatial distribution of forces circulating between the object and the fingertip. An experiment on following sharp edges of virtual object comparing the force feedback alone and different tactile augmentations is presented and discussed, alone with some open epistemological issues.

Haptics Rendering and Applications, 2012