CAREER:HCC:Democratizing Haptics: Enabling Novice Designers with Vibrotactile Models and Tools

Today's technology includes only minimal touch feedback, which has unfortunate consequences on people's lives. Touchscreen phones and car dashboards demand visual attention, putting people's safety at risk. Virtual environments neglect or diminish users' abilities to grasp and move objects, impacting dexterity. The emerging immersive education and work training opportunities largely exclude blind and low-vision users. Finally, the fact that telecommunication (for example, calling family to check in) lacks social touch and a sense of co-presence leads to anxiety and depression over time. Advances in programmable touch technology, known as haptic technology, can offer a future free of these challenges, but experienced haptic designers are few, and becoming an expert in haptics takes years of practice. The main question in haptic design remains: "How can I convey the desired meaning to users through touch?" It is surprisingly difficult to design vibration signals that can evoke relevant meanings in users' minds and are easy to distinguish from one another. Currently, creating such signals relies on trial-and-error exploration of engineering parameters and extensive user testing. This inefficient process discourages domain-expert designers (car manufacturers, accessibility experts, educators, therapists, and the like) from including haptics in their applications. To address this barrier to using haptics, this project will democratize vibration design by investigating how humans interpret and distinguish vibration signals. Specifically, the project will develop models that predict how people (1) describe a signal's meaning with natural language and (2) perceive the similarity of signals. Next, the investigator and her team will (3) build haptic authoring tools that interleave these models with designer input to help quickly converge on plausible haptic signals for an application. The investigator team will then study the tools' impact on enabling designers to achieve their creative visions. This project will focus on three vibrotactile technologies that target receptors in our hands and offer the widest range of contact and contactless vibrotactile feedback: mechanical vibration actuators, surface electrovibration devices, and mid-air ultrasound haptics. In contrast to previous studies that rely on signals with a few controlled parameters, this research will model the human processing of complex signals created by human designers. The outcomes of this research will pioneer the development of a new class of sensory language models, reveal generalizable trends in human vibrotactile perception and language across three technologies, and identify specific opportunities for haptic tools and residency programs to scaffold learning and collaboration for interdisciplinary haptic design teams. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.